🎉150. SPN: Distribution, distribution, distribution

Plus, spend efficiency; craft vs creativity; lots of Jobs

Apr 27, 2025

Today marks the 150th edition of SPN 🎉

Thank you for making SPN part of your weekly reading. Whether you’ve been here since the early days or just recently subscribed, thank you for your trust and letting me play a part in how you keep sharp and stay curious.

A huge thank you as well to Fundraise Up for their continued sponsorship and support — they make it possible for SPN to keep growing and reaching more operators like you.

Here’s to the next 150 editions! 🥂

In this week’s SPN:

How to reduce CPC/CPA overnight
No one wants to see brand content. Whitelist more!
Craft vs Creativity
Refresh your Email snd SMS flows
and, plenty of Jobs & Opps that took my fancy this week

Let’s jump in.

When the Rainforest Trust adopted Fundraise Up their numbers exploded!
50% ⬆️ increase in online giving year-over-year
25% ⬆️ increase in donors giving in international currencies
6% ⬆️ increase in recurring donations, month-over-month
“We were absolutely blown away. Our whole team was so amazed with all the functionality, and the look and feel is phenomenal. And it pops right up — you don’t have to wait for another page to load when you’re ready to donate. The little reminders that follow you around the website — they work. They convert.” Rainforest Trust.
Now it’s your turn to land some incremental revenue by virtue of just using better technology. Reach out to Fundraise Up to learn more.

Distribution, Craft & Creativity

This seemed like a seminal week for GAFA.

Despite their craven pilgrimage to the Trump inauguration, the heads of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple have not got the air cover they anticipated.

Lots of people like to slag off Google but few Fundraising operators I know are that critical - they value the reach and reckon the ads work pretty well.

The stock market turmoil seems to have hit them all hard. The tariff wars threaten to push a hole in to next quarter numbers - especially at Meta who could see $7 billion evaporate. The DOGE attack on big Government has done little to derail the regulators. The Justice Department said the best way to address the company’s monopoly in internet search was to force it to sell Chrome, among other measures. And the EU is being no kinder to them.

Why is this interesting? Because the general economic uncertainty is seeing a lot of ad budgets across our sector capped.

→ Tough times. And how GAFA choose to respond will shape the next era of advertising. Check out the post below on how to squeeze more from your current budget.

With Google calling time on its protracted plan to phase out cookies, could this be a clue they will get out of programmatic?

The idea they have to sell Chrome has excited the market with OpenAI heading the queue. They announced during the hearings they would like to buy Chrome. Well of course they would.

I chat all day long about the importance of content distribution not just creation, and similarly the AI race will be won by those with the best distribution - and it doesn’t get much better than Chrome - used by 64% of people online - 3 times more than Apple Safari in second place.

Talking of which the key issue in AI is the quest to understand the role for us humans. Is AI going to adopt the dull roles, like the first generation of robots have done with dishwashers and washing machines?

I was reminded of this Nick Cave letter from a couple of years ago writing about the very human process of writing a song:

“This is what we humble humans can offer, that AI can only mimic, the transcendent journey of the artist that forever grapples with his or her own shortcomings. This is where human genius resides, deeply embedded within, yet reaching beyond, those limitations.”

No LLM is going to look at African art from the Congo and do what Picasso did - parse that original unknown talent and create cubism.

No LLM is going to write songs that redefine musical movements; Coltrane with A Love Supreme or James Brown with Papas got a Brand New Bag.

Nor could it see how Kool Herc saw that two turntables could magic up the alchemy of a new music from the bones of the old

Does the issue come down to a tension between Craft and Creativity?

Think of a classic ad like Guinness Surfers.

Crazy good. The wonderful graphics owe a lot to the talent of director Jonathan Glazer and the VFX team. But the true creativity comes from David Abbott, Tom Carty and Walter Campbell who came up with the concept and hired Glazer et al to make their vision a reality. Not obvious people when you dig a layer deeper.

25 years on the contribution of Glazer and the VFX talent could soon be handled by MidJourney or Veo. That’s Craft.

But we still need a super talented human to write the prompt in the way David Abbot could. That’s Creativity.

I was mesmerized this week by Demis Hassabis of Deep Mind who delved into this in a podcast on AI, game theory, multimodality, and the nature of creativity:

And then there’s the question of if you think about creative, the creative arts, whether there’ll be new ways of working. Much more fluid. Instead of doing Adobe Photoshop or something, you’re actually co-creating this thing with this fluid responsive tool. And that could kind of feel more like Minority Report or something I imagine. With the interface and there’s this thing swirling around, but it will require people to get used to a very new workflow, to take maximum advantage of that. But I think when they do it’ll be probably incredible for those people. They’ll be like 10 X more productive.

Maybe we can delegate the routine and the ordinary tasks of fundraising to AI and use the time freed up to use AI to help donors experience the art of great storytelling that can define your Org and its programs?

This is a good read: Marketing’s New Middleman: AI Agents.

Jobs & Opps 🛠️

Feathr: Senior Manager of Partnerships

Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB): Chief People Officer (£86,1000 - £109,300)

MSF USA: Philanthropic Communications Lead ($$88,822 - $133,233)=

WWF: Bridge Intern

Walmart: Director, Strategic Initiatives, ESG Climate and Nature ($110,000 - $220,000)

World Bank Group: Innovation Officer, Storytelling

World Economic Forum: Lead, Circular Economy Initiatives

ASCAP Foundation: Executive Director ($175,000 - $225,000)

National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum: Chief Development Officer ($180,000 - $230,800)

Mozilla: Major Gifts Officer ($102,000 - $143,615)

National MS Society: VP, Individual Giving ($165,000 - $200,000)

The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society: Executive Director, San Francisco ($175,000 - $195,500)

→Plenty more jobs on SPN’s sister site: www.pledgr.com

Spend Efficiency

If you're facing capped budgets or higher acquisition costs, the below is for you.

→ Proven approaches I’ve put into market to lower CPAs, squeeze more from channels, and make your spend work harder for you.

Whitelisted Ads - reduce CPC/CPA overnight

There’s a good chance you’re running paid advertising right now, and it’s a meaningful contribution to net-new donor acquisition. On top of ensuring that you’re rotating in new ad creative (more on that below), running an efficiently set-up account structure, having good data feedback into Meta, etc., you should also make sure you’re whitelisting some accounts to run ads from.

It doesn’t have to be from well-known influencers... it could be your ED or an employee’s account, a publisher to pay to whitelist from, a meme account, your dog’s IG account - really anything except your Org’s name is worth trying out.

Whitelisted ads outperform branded content because they fit the context of the feed better. Test it. Lower CPMs, higher CTRs, and still it’s only ever ~20% of spend in most Meta accounts. Whitelist more!

Use Landing Pages to Educate

Landing pages are one of the easiest ways to boost donor education, improve AOV, and also drive a better conversion rate for paid traffic. For UNICEF Market, a bundle product page (PDP) vs the same bundle on a landing page had a difference of 2% CVR for the PDP and 11% on the landing page.

This page should answer five questions over and over again with multiple sections:

1. What is your product? You can do this with Programs too.
2. Why does it exist?
3. How will it benefit the beneficiary?
4. Why are you best-suited to deliver this good thing?
5. If I donate today, what’s the journey of my dollar - how soon is the impact of my donation going to be felt?

You can launch new themed bundles with landing pages, especially driving traffic from your CRM list. An Easter Bundle, Earth Day Bundle, Mother’s Day Bundle, Father’s Day Bundle… inspo just from April/May.

Use Collab Posts on Instagram

As efficient as your paid ads can be, you need to always be building your Org’s brand image, extending brand awareness, and reaching new eyeballs. One easy way to do that is to do more collaboration posts on Instagram.

Whether they’re publisher/media accounts you partner on content with, influencers you’re seeding product to or program site visits, or partnerships you do with other Org’s, this allows you to reach a very targeted audience with a very genuine approach.

Maximize Your Influencer and Creator Engagements

When you partner with a creator, influencer, “ambassador’s”, etc., don’t just create 1 video as your deliverable. Instead, write a brief that includes multiple hooks, multiple talking points you can mix and match, multiple calls to action, and a wide variety of b-roll footage. Now, instead of creating 1 video for the cost of working with a creator, you can make 15.

The catch is that you have to handle the editing on your side, but you can do that with an agency a freelance editor, or an editor tool yourself.

Recalibrate Media Channels

Focus your performance media on channels you know are driving impact, not just programmatic pre-roll, display ads, etc. If you feel confident that a channel like Criteo is driving meaningful revenue because its dashboards say so, run an incrementality test with a hold-out group.

It goes both ways... a channel like YouTube may not report significant numbers in-platform, but with an incrementality study, it will show that over 8 weeks, it drove many new donors.

Refresh your Email & SMS Flows

Your email campaigns shouldn’t be set-and-forget. It’s essential to audit and optimize your flows regularly. Look at where you can improve the copy, design layouts, Match offers, program highlights, CTA placements, etc.

As your performance marketing scales, you should set up a learnings transfer every month, or at the very least every quarter. The best ad copy, headlines, and hooks for videos can be meaningful inspiration for email flows.

Rapid-fire Static Ad Testing

On a shoestring budget, rapid static ad creation and iteration are the best ways to test and learn. Once you find winning ad copy, apply it to different layouts (get ChatGPT to help you with design inspiration). Once you find a winning layout, use that layout with a variety of different copy.

Today, the creative itself is the targeting engine.