A very warm welcome to all the new subscribers. I’m thrilled to have you as readers and truly appreciate your feedback and support.
In this week’s SPN:
Campaign breakdown: visual panache
Using art, tech and community dialogue to drive action
What is incrementality?
Why shift how we think, measure and optimize towards effectiveness?
Jobs & Opps that caught my eye this week
Let’s dig in!
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Their sheer processing power helped me significantly reduce the number of failed transactions and associated costly chargeback fees, and they got us through countless big days of giving without slowdowns or crashes.
Game changer? It was for me.
Inspire Action, Foster Community
Ambling to my barber in Brooklyn this week I came across “Mended Murals” - a multi-city campaign and initiative. The QR code incorporated on the wall explained Vaseline was working with local artists, trying to highlight the importance of skin health equity, and increasing access to skin health care resources for Black and Brown communities.
Creating impactful, socially conscious marketing that speaks directly to community needs is hard. And harder still to execute well. Vaseline’s effort nails it and offers some good lessons to draw inspiration from.
SPN has gone deep into donor experience and journeys, discussed offline strategies and dabbled in DOOH. But it hasn’t looked at leveraging street art. However this campaign from Vaseline so cleverly connects technology, visual panache and community engagement to drive action that we’re going to go there!
Robert Vargas’ intro to the initiative is a good place to start:
Eons ago (2022), Vaseline launched the See My Skin platform: an online image database that showed people of color what skin conditions looked like on their own skin tone.
With locations in Brooklyn, Baltimore, and Hartford Connecticut this campaign iteration uses art restoration (wrecked/graffiti’d/crumbling murals) to shed light on the importance of caring for darker skin.
The embedded QR codes in the murals direct people to SeeMySkin.com, where there’s a ton of valuable skin health resources. And Vaseline pledged $250,000 to health clinics across the three cities.
Lessons Learnt
Action Meets Purpose
Soo often, brands and Orgs alike struggle to communicate what they’re actually doing for a cause. This isn’t the case here. Action is the differentiator. Plus, any passers-by or community member is left in no doubt via the QR code of the action and purpose behind what is being done. It baffles me how under-utilized the QR code remains, despite the fact that we all experienced its utility during covid.
Technology Enhances Accessibility
The See My Skin platform is a great example of bringing action to life, using storytelling and the power of art to visualize the brand’s commitment to inclusive skin health care. And in fairness to Vaseline, they went beyond just providing people with resources. They put money on the line and donated $250,000 across charitable health clinics.
I also appreciated that the murals aren’t obviously branded, and while that makes it harder to connect the campaign to Vaseline, the smartly (and artfully) added QR codes serve as a neat way to engage people with the brand and its mission.
Address a Specific Need
Vaseline identified a specific need - improving access to skin healthcare for people of color - and created a platform that directly addresses this gap. The lesson for Orgs here is to identify and focus on a unique need within the communities served, ensuring initiatives have a clear purpose and meet real demands. That’s a lot easier said than done.
Community Engagement
Inviting people to submit murals for restoration is also a great example of community engagement.
SPN talks a lot about audiences and taking an audience-centric approach to any marketing and fundraising activities. By extension, many Orgs would do well to get closer to their communities and to specific groups of under-served people to understand their challenges. And then take that next step with them - the design and development process - to ensure needs are being met rather than implied.
The key element to this campaign that really resonated with me was less the art itself but that Vaseline didn’t go ahead and restore the artworks on its own. It reached out to the artists who created the murals and collaborated with them to spruce them up. Nobody can be accused of commercializing street art.
And by getting people to interact with the campaign and suggest murals in need of retouching, Vaseline opened up an ongoing dialogue with communities to keep the campaign alive for longer.
I’m an Elizabeth Arden Eight Hour Cream person myself, but I’m into Vaseline’s smarts here.
Jobs & Opps 🛠️
Wildlife Justice Commission: Global Development Director
Feeding America: Manager, Direct Marketing Fundraising Services
Give Butter: Director, Data Strategy
Make-a-Wish Foundation: CIO
World Vision: Senior Director, Sponsorship Product Marketing
Incrementality
In just over 1 in 4 SPN’s I’ve used the word “incremental”. In every case it’s been used in the context of revenue i.e. incremental revenue. Incrementality is also an approach and a mindset.
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.”
This quote from John Wanamaker remains true today. As nonprofit operators we need to spend more time identifying which half of our marketing is driving results.
The current digital landscape is a diverse one, jam-packed with tools servicing paid social, organic social, email, sms, online marketplaces, search engines, video platforms and too much more.
Each of these platforms unlocks new audiences. In fact, research shows that donors need an average of 10 touch points before making a donation. But with rising CPMs and compounding competition, Orgs can no longer throw money at the wall and expect efficient results.
Today, we need to know the exact value that every dollar in ad spend will yield. And this can only be done through incrementality.
But what is incrementality?
As the digital advertising space becomes more saturated and donor journeys more complex, the importance of understanding and leveraging incrementality is only growing.
Most of us rely on the same channels year after year. While these channels seemingly generate results, we’re essentially promoting our Org to the same audience pool and missing out on the opportunity to reach new audiences.
An incremental outcome is one that wouldn’t have happened without a specific marketing action.
Incrementality in marketing measures the actual impact that a marketing activity has on a specific KPI.
A helpful way to think about it is if you drive 100 donations through a paid social campaign, how many of those fundraising dollars were a direct result of the campaign and not the result of multiple other touch points.
This concept has gained increased traction in response to the stricter landscape of user privacy in the last few years. It also ties back into attribution, since you don’t want to pay for the same result twice (or accidentally have 2 different platforms both attributing the result).
Don’t get the two confused.
Attribution is the process of matching two touch points of data. Incrementality takes into account attribution to determine the true effectiveness of your marketing activities.
However, you can leverage the two through Media Mix Modeling to forecast the best allocation of your budget across all marketing efforts, not just those that can be attributed.
This requires a high level of data scrutiny, especially when considering privacy regulations and the difficulty of accounting for audience overlap. No surprises then that predictive modeling is the favored approach for measuring incrementality.
Let’s shift into third gear and explore how you can actually test it.
Like most testing methodologies, this involves a Control Group and Test Group.
Here’s a hypothetical: You’re running a campaign for your Org and want to test its incremental lift. Group A is your control group, a benchmark that you can compare performance to. This group hasn’t been exposed to the campaign. Group B, however, was exposed to the campaign. Group A had 200 donations and Group B had 250 donations.
We can calculate the incremental lift by taking the difference in donations between the test and control group, dividing that by the number of donations from the control group, and multiplying by 100. It’s literally the formula for percent change.
In this case, incremental lift would be 25%. Meaning that the campaign generated a 25% lift in donations overall (or in this case, 50 donations).
You can also use this to determine incrementality, or the percentage of the test group that converted due to the campaign. In this example, those 50 additional donations made up 20% of Group B’s total dollars raised.
But how do you make sense of this?
Now we can calculate whether the total spend associated with the campaign is worth those 50 additional donations. This means taking the full cost of the campaign and only dividing by those donations to determine cost of acquisition (rather than dividing by the full 250 donations since 200 of those donations would’ve happened without that campaign).
So even though there’s a positive incremental lift, if the cost of the campaign is too high, it may not justify continued investment.
There are times when you’ll see a neutral or negative lift (do you even call it a lift in that case?)
A neutral lift means that your campaign is generating fundraising dollars, but isn’t driving incremental value. This is when you’ve got to consider changing your creative or updating your targeting to generate a positive lift.
Occasionally, you might see a negative incremental lift. Uncommon but it’s still possible - an. overly aggressive retargeting campaign could turn off prospective supporters, for example. A more common occurrence is where your paid marketing efforts are cannibalizing organic performance.
Incrementality 2.0
Let’s take it up a notch. Here are 5 practical reasons to start elevating your thinking in terms of incrementality:
Precision in Ad Spend
We’re operating in a crowded and competitive space, making it expensive to rely on hit-or-miss strategies. Incrementality is going to help determine the real value of ad dollars, reduce waste, and reallocate budgets towards high-performing audiences.
Understanding Donor Journeys
With donors interacting with Orgs across multiple touch points before making a donation, incrementality is going to highlight which interactions are truly influencing decisions.
Adapting to Privacy Changes
As user privacy regulations tighten, traditional attribution models are becoming less reliable. Incrementality doesn’t rely solely on donor-specific tracking, making it a more sustainable approach in a privacy-focused world.
Optimizing Marketing Mix
By employing techniques like media mix modeling, you can use incrementality insights to forecast the most effective allocation of your budget across all efforts, considering both attributable and non-attributable channels.
Improving Campaign Effectiveness
Incrementality testing, with its control and test group setup, will allow you to refine your strategies in real-time, ensuring campaigns aren’t just generating volume but adding true value.
Wrapping Up
The benefits of incrementality thinking and testing can’t be overstated. It’s the single most accurate way to deduce the actual cost of acquired donors and it will also prevent you from cannibalizing your organic traffic.
Incrementality requires that you fundamentally shift how you think, measure and optimize towards effectiveness. It affords an opportunity for nonprofit operators to really think deeply about their approach.
By focusing on the incremental impact of our marketing and fundraising actions, my experience was that we were able to far more accurately assess the effectiveness of our strategies and make more informed decisions about where to invest resources.
That’s all for today!
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And huge thanks to this Quarter’s sponsor Fundraise Up for creating a new standard for online giving.
Now onto the fun stuff!
Interesting Reads from my Week
Why Marketers are not Deterred by TikTok’s Uncertain Future (Digiday)
How a Former Top Pizza Marketer Is Now Promoting Jesus (WSJ)
What’s Driving the Influencer Subscription Boom (Business of Fashion)
What Gen Z Will Lose If They Do Not Have Friendships at Work (WSJ)
What Do You Get Paid for 1,000,000,000 Streams? (Rick Beato)
The FTC’s Broad Definition of Sensitive Data Should Be a Major Wake-Up Call for Ad Tech (AdExchanger)
Why Home Depot Believes It Can Win Retail Media Dollars (Digiday)
Reddit’s S-1 (SEC.gov)
How the Big Holding Companies Are Handling GenAI (Martech.org)
Luxury Briefing: In-Seam Proves the 1% Want Convenience, Not Experiences (Glossy)