84. Some Personal News
Building familiarity with your audience
A very warm welcome to all the new subscribers. I’m thrilled to have you as readers and truly appreciate your feedback and support.
Good morning! In this week’s SPN:
Video mediums - horses for courses, with examples and a “best till last”
Comms planning without a plan
Lessons from “Tube Girl’s” TikTok
Jobs & Opps
Shout out to our sponsor Fundraise Up who stopped me pestering our Dev team!!
With Fundraise Up you don’t need to know HTML, CSS, or JavaScript to edit your donation form or build buttons on your site. It’s dead easy to build and customize. Then you just copy/paste the code snippet and set it to publish. No technical ability required.
They have 20+ customizable UI components too, including pre-built stat counters, animated hearts, goal meters, impact sliders… give your Dev team some time back!
The best bit? These components increased our conversion rate to donate. 💕
Comms Planning without a Plan
How can Org’s decipher through the noise and pick out what’s good content that deserves paid investment vs. what’s going to die tomorrow?
Take “Tube Girl”, actual name Sabrina Bahsoon. The video on the London Underground with hair flowing in the no-AC-sticky-wind of the Central Line was uploaded August 13. At the time she had 3k followers, which is the equivalent of having 100 Facebook friends in 2007. Doable and nothing noteworthy.
Then she published this video ^ which has amassed 29.9M views. Her videos are now averaging between 4M - 17.5M views. For context, Duolingo, a famous brand known for its infamous TikTok account, averages views in the 300k - 1M range.
Some smart person at MAC (makeup brand) saw an opportunity and on 16 September, almost a month to the day of her TikTok, the algorithm gods had Tube Girl show up on everyone’s FYP (For You Page). Then instantaneously she was everywhere.
Tube Girl’s rapid rise to fame begs the question - “is there a lesson here for nonprofit Org’s?”
Mac, Bentley, London Fashion Week all scrambled to engage Tube Girl and fast. If all the decisions these Social Media Managers and Partnership Teams were making had to get senior management team approval then these accounts would never exist.
Social Media Managers and Partnership Teams are essential hires for any Org. Good one’s are worth every penny and can see around cultural trend corners. At the very least they cultivate your brand voice by knowing which trends to tap into and which ones are cringe-worthy. In many ways, they exercise something hard to define: taste.
Long lost are the days of lengthy SMT and “legal review” processes to approve ads and partners. If that was the case, marketing teams across the country would just now be posting their Barbie content, for example:
How many times have you been guilty of thinking we have this creative, can we just put it into the real world and make it go viral! But more often than not we’re hitting audiences with information they don’t care about or can’t relate to.
Every view or extra second watched is a value exchange. Org’s need to go so far as demanding attention. Your mission deserves it.
Leave room to be reactive, don’t let a comms strategy or legal team kill your best partnership opportunity.
When a person does something most of us wish we had the confidence to do (and look glam doing it) it’s the perfect place for an Org to show up. Bold, Unrelenting, and Trending.
Does it fit on a comms plan of Awareness, Frequency, and Conversion - nope.
Is it the perfect alignment for young people that exude confidence - absolutely.
If Tube Girl, or the next yet to be uncovered viral star, helps you build familiarity with your audience, I’d say it’s well worth the investment of time and marketing budget.
Jobs & Opps
Relief International: Chief Development & Marketing Officer
Project Hope: Senior Director, Marketing
The Pew Charitable Trusts: Director, Impact and Innovation
Bat Conservation International: Chief Growth Officer
Water Mission: Director, Partnerships
Video Mediums Aren’t All Equal
Video moves donors’ hearts and minds in a way that a Paid Social post or static Display ad does not. And while short-form video ruled the roost in 2023 there’s a couple of realities worth flagging.
Constrained targeting
AI enabling video personalization at scale
Burning through a budget
I give a little context on each of these bullets below and then dig into which video mediums and assets I’ve seen successfully (and unsuccessfully) deployed across the Donor Journey, running the gamut from “traditional” through to “innovative” mediums.
3rd party cookie deprecation will limit marketers’ and technology’s ability to be extremely precise in their targeting, increasing the importance of good creative assets that initiate incremental donations.
The rise of Generative AI will undoubtedly propel video innovation further, creating new video formats (e.g. VR content for Apple Vision Pro) and enabling video personalization at scale.
The more prolonged exposure to the person on the other side of the screen plus lower viewability concerns means video is going to be more expensive than a comparable Display or Text Ad placement.
Pair this with the 64% erosion in the Advertising supply chain and video becomes a tool that can either help you achieve your Org’s goals or burn through an entire marketing budget with very little return. And either of those options can happen fast.
Different Mediums, Examples and Assets
One of the best examples I’ve seen of using traditional TV without breaking the bank is UNICEF’s partnership with MSNBC for the KIND Fund. The airings during the last month of every year consistently produced a significant bump in our site visits and EOY donations.
Lots of Org’s could benefit from partnering with more “minor”, potentially regional-type TV, channels for similar PR opportunities. And, the end. This is truly the extent to which you should use traditional TV.
Streaming and CTV
Streaming has brought much-needed targeting capabilities. It’s considerably expensive compared to some of the shorter video formats but an excellent medium to deploy for high-impact campaigns – namely:
A channel to reach out to your existing high-value irregular or one-time donors to move them to become monthly pledge contributors.
A channel to do more significant emergency or EOY fundraising programs with your monthly donor base, focusing the message on the impact your loyal donors provide to the cause – simultaneously increasing their loyalty and achieving short-term fundraising goals.
Use CTV as the primary channel for driving viewership if your Org produces original content, such as Partners In Health’s Bending the Arc.
What proved highly successful for direct fundraising was pairing CTV campaigns with Display Companion Ads that run on mobile devices in the same household when the CTV ad is running.
Most platforms have this functionality – the partner you’re working with for media buying should be able to walk you through it.
YouTube
Don’t waste your time with Discovery and Shorts. I did and am still yet to see one example of either being useful for fundraising. Let me know if you’ve got one and I’ll share it in SPN #85.
YouTube’s In-Stream Ads, on the other hand, are worth a good look. They work really well for increasing conversion rates. The primary use case I’ve found for it is retargeting to Prospective Donors who have started but not finished their donation.
In fact, especially for high-AOV prospective donor segments or causes, YouTube has consistently proved to be a much better retargeting channel than traditional Paid Social or Display across most Org’s I’ve observed. This applies to both skippable inventory and the unskippable 6-second and 15-second assets.
I’ve found that unskippable assets – especially shorter, 6-second ones – are a great way to communicate with existing monthly donors to remind them of the impact they make. Costs for 6-second videos aren’t much higher than traditional Display advertising, and the extra viewability positively impacts churn rates.
Short-Form Paid Social Videos – Reels, Stories, and TikTok
Arguably any of these platforms can be used across the entirety of the donor journey but I’ve seen the best performance in the following scenarios:
Stories, benefitting from traditional Facebook’s optimization algorithm skewed towards CPA, usually perform better as a direct-response, new first-time donor acquisition medium – especially amongst the young-to-mid Millennial groups.
Similar to YouTube Shorts, Reels hasn’t produced any considerable impact for Org’s I’ve worked with – either missing the mark or performing at the same level as Stories or TikTok without providing any incremental reach.
TikTok is unparalleled in its reach and engagement metrics amongst younger audiences. It’s undoubtedly the best way to target, reach, and engage those who match your ideal donor profile and are in the 18-34 age range. The cost of advertising on the platform is still higher than traditional non-video mediums. For Org’s with aggressive RoAS targets or limited budgets, focus your activity and just use TikTok to retarget and convert one-time donors to monthly.
BEST TILL LAST! → On-website video and email
By far, the best performance from video content I’ve seen was achieved outside your typical video channels.
Adding long-form embedded videos into thank-you emails sent to one-time or irregular donors drove upwards of a 30% CVR increase to monthly donations.
Take your Exec Director’s thank-you video email to the next level. This use case will become ever more applicable with Generative AI pushing the limits of video personalization. Did you listen to the Argentinian President’s Davos speech last week? He used the AI startup HeyGen to accurately translate it to English in real time and the result was astonishing. The software even had his lips move so that it looked like he was speaking English while maintaining his mannerisms and facial expressions.
Wrapping Up
Do Traditional with pro-bono PR partnerships at the nationwide or local networks level.
CTV inventory is high-impact and expensive - think of it as a “sniping” tool, not a spray-and-pray donkey.
YouTube is a great way to retarget those who are very close but yet to convert.
Instagram Stories is a valuable New Donor acquisition channel.
Use TikTok as a New Donor acquisition channel if you’re targeting donors who skew younger.
On-website impact videos increase conversion rate.
In-email videos increase conversions to monthly pledge donations.
Start experimenting with AI video creative and using free mediums (email and website) to test the impact of personalized video communications.
That’s all for today!
Don’t hesitate to email with any questions. Thank you to those that do.
And huge thanks to this Quarter’s sponsor Fundraise Up for creating a new standard for online giving.
And now onto the fun stuff!
Interesting Reads from my Week
Print Prospered In 2023, And Is On Track To Repeat That Success In 2024.
TikTok is taking 30-minute videos for a test run.
A smart SPN friend pointed me to this Adobe article on using TikTok as a search engine - some Org’s are starting to see huge volume from TikTok search.
Generative AI isn’t marketing’s future, it’s already part of its present.
One example quoted in the above article is an ad for Hotel Chocolat where they avoided expensive animation through use of GenAI.
Alix Partners Disruption Index.
Putting parents in charge of teen downloads.
Why a 2023 Super Bowl ad campaign is 2024’s commercial to watch.