92. Some Personal News (SPN)

📈9 recommendations to move your program up and to the right

Mar 24, 2024

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:

The most powerful 90 second campaign I’ve seen from a nonprofit Org
5 key elements to running an ideation session where there are no bad ideas
Deep dive: 9 recommendations for managing digital spend erosion
Jobs & Opps that caught my eye this week

Let’s dig in!

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Game changer? It was for me.

“Assume That I Can”

Take center stage: Italian nonprofit Org, CoorDown.

They grabbed my attention this week and truly held on to it with a film that challenged my assumptions about people with Down Syndrome.

Most nonprofit marketing I see today is completely uninspired.

Bland podcast appearances by senior management without a real point of view
Email campaigns that read the same but with the Org names switched out
Stock images of people, plants or animals at pains to pose in “neutral”
Generic direct mail campaigns

Released to coincide with World Down Syndrome Day (3/21) “Assume That I Can” is a 90-second spot that stars a young woman with Down Syndrome, who explains how people in her life - from parents to teachers to bartenders - create a self-fulfilling prophecy when they assume she isn’t capable of having sex, “learning fucking Shakespeare” or drinking a margarita.

“You assumed I couldn’t swear, right?”

It sounds heavy going, but the film has the energy and style of a Nike spot, and Canadian actor Madison Tevlin carries the message with a fantastic blend of self assured’ness and flamboyance. It’s memorable. Check it out:

Watching this you can’t help but think that maybe at least one reason brand and fundraising growth is so hard to get going at the moment is because what’s being put into market is bland. Read: undistinguishable, same-same.

SPN talks a lot about donor experience. Most of SPN’s readers are very much in a position to impact donor experience. Hell, even SPN’s sponsor Fundraise Up lives and breathes donor experience! So is there a secret spot where creative campaigns are all launching that I don’t know about?

Let me put a stake in the ground and suggest it comes down to two things:

Most Orgs and leaders don’t give their teams the space to take big swings and miss.
Most marketing leaders don’t understand the art and discipline of brainstorming enough to actually generate big or creative ideas from their team.

I could write a book of very average experiences with the first bullet, so for today let’s focus on the second bullet - The Art of Brainstorming. Think about how most marketing and fundraising ideations go today. My experience is as follows:

They’re usually in response to being behind on the fundraising goal, “We need some big ideas!”
Most people are afraid to throw out any true big ideas for either fear or they know the Org would never actually do it anyways.
Budget is always used as an inhibitor vs having less of it being leveraged as a forcing function to think differently.
There’s no structure to it - so very few ideas get generated and the meeting ends up kinda nowhere but all over the place. And it’s even worse if not in-person.

The end result is just a bunch of generic watered down ideas of what you were probably going to do anyways. Surely we’ve all sat through these painful sessions at some point!

Keys to Running Brilliant Brainstorms

But there’s another side to this. The best sessions I’ve participated in that actually improved our marketing and fundraising efforts all shared these core elements:

A regular cadence - people generally can’t do their best creative thinking in crisis mode. The best time to do brainstorms isn’t after you missed your half yearly goal. Build a regular cadence for an exercise like this.
Ideating is an exercise - it’s a muscle that needs worked on and strengthened, and flexibility (of thought) is developed from committing to regularly doing it.
There are no bad ideas - if you’re leading, lead by example and throw out a massive or terrible idea to get people to understand this is a safe space. There should be no negative feedback.
Quantity over Quality - the goal of a brainstorm is to generate a lot of ideas, focus on narrowing it down to just the good ones later. The more ideas get thrown out the more others can feed off of them and generate more ideas
Structure the meeting - don’t just pull everyone into a room, stand in front of a whiteboard and ask for ideas. Try one of these formats instead.
- Set the stage for the goal you’re trying to impact and ask people to come to the meeting with ideas already in mind.
- Use the 6-3-5 method: 6 people generate 3 ideas in 5 minutes - in just a half an hour you’ll have generated 108 ideas.
- Random matching - have people write down 10 random items (a coffee cup or shoe for example). Then they have to take the list and tie it into a marketing idea. I’m always amazed at the unique ideas that come out of this. And it’s fun.

Most importantly, is to then go and actually implement some of the ideas generated. And then report back on them and share the results.

Get that flywheel spinning.

Jobs & Opps 🛠️

USA for UNHCR: VP Strategy & Impact

Breast Cancer Research Foundation: Associate Director, Digital Marketing

Malala Fund: Co-Founder Voice & Comms Director

American Diabetes Association: Director, Marketing, Programs & Partnerships

Pratham (USA): Head of Marketing and Fundraising

American Jewish Committee: Director, Social Media

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital - ALSAC: Director, Media Activation & Measurement

British Asian Trust: Director, Marketing & Communications (member of Senior Management Team)

UNICEF UK (2 roles): Director, Strategy and Chief Strategic Development Officer

Combatting Digital Spend Erosion

Regular readers of SPN will know that the ANA’s Programmatic Media Supply Chain study published in December ’23 has 1) kept me up at night and 2) is a treasure trove of research.

If you’re a budget approver, know this - only 36 cents of every dollar spent on digital media effectively reaches your prospective donor. How so?

Transaction costs (primarily ad placement fees) account for 29% of the ad dollar.
Loss of media productivity costs (non-viewable and IVT impressions, as well as non-measurable for viewability and Made for Advertising ad spend e.g. those high ad-to-content type sites) account for 35% of the ad dollar.

It gets even more uncomfortable when expressed as an image!

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The ANA’s report is very in-depth and long, but the insights are also critically important. So I’ve done my own analysis and distilled it into 9 practical recommendations that every Org can put into practice.

If you’re using a media agency I hope they’ve digested it every which way and come to you with an action plan.

For the in-house practitioners among us and those leading digital programs, I hope the analysis below captures a large chunk of the report’s value while not being nearly as time-consuming to read or enact. Regardless of the current “spend conversion” rate for your Org, the intention here is that the 9 recommendations help move your program up and to the right.

Limit the number of platforms you buy media on

Diversification is healthy in most places, but not so much in digital marketing. Most DSPs, for example Google Marketing Platform (Google’s unified ad and analytics platform e.g. Campaign Manager 360 + Display & Video 360) do the same thing. They supposedly figure out the best open impression auctions for your Org to participate in every second, calculate the best price based on your objectives, and place the bid on your behalf.

Differentiation comes in targeting the auctions that are most suitable for your Org and is based on a DSP’s ability to predict the likelihood of each auction hitting your objectives. Is it the right person to see the impression? Is it the right time, context, etc?

DSPs differentiate on two items:

Which proprietary Data it has access to about the donors (because the rest of the information in the auction is “public”)
How good the platform is at analyzing that data quickly

Differentiating in data analysis is hard. Every DSP will tell you they have the best AI model in the backend, and there’s no way to validate any of those claims. In my opinion, all the leading platforms have strong teams of developers in the back office. If one of them somehow managed to run ahead of the pack, others would replicate it immediately. Of course, there are marginal differences in performance, but they don’t matter too much on budgets under $1M a month.

With data, some uniqueness can be gained. Amazon has its purchase history; Google allows targeting based on past searches; Criteo has a wide array of direct partnerships with publishers; TheTradeDesk has pooled the leading non-cookie-based coalition to defeat Google. But even this uniqueness is questionable and doesn’t justify the risk of double bidding against yourself and significantly increasing frequency.

Regardless of the data a given DSP has access to, if the underlying models are as strong as they seem – every Org using multiple DSPs will be going after a limited universe of their defined target donors, unavoidably bidding against itself.

The only two ways around it are splitting the target markets between DSPs in a way they physically can’t overlap – such as by State – or sticking to a limited number of DSPs, most frequently, just one or two.

Recommendation: Stick with one platform until your spending consistently exceeds $500k/mo and focus on optimizing within it.

Cost of audience targeting

Every DSP has audience targeting options, and one of those is to include - or exclude - specific 3rd party audiences. Those always sound attractive - “charitable donors with a household income of $100,000+” or “Regular Red Cross Donors,” etc.

However, each of these audiences adds a hefty price tag of $0.5 - $3 CPM to your campaigns - which can be up to 40-50% of the total cost of impression - and is based on modeled information that’s up to 6 months old. Little quality for lots of money!

Recommendation: Don’t use 3rd party audience targeting - instead, use look-a-likes of your donor data or contextual targeting, such as keywords on the page.

Limit your Frequency per Minute

Most DSPs have functionality to limit frequency per month, day, lifetime, etc. The one that is the most helpful for reducing waste in the digital marketing supply chain is frequency per minute. The ANA makes a really good point that “most websites optimize for ad revenue, not ad conversion.” Here’s a great example:

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Salesforce doesn’t need to show me four ads simultaneously – but setting the lifetime frequency limit at 8, 12, or 24 wouldn’t prevent this.

Recommendation: Limit the frequency per minute to no more than two. Think of the benefit to the donor experience AND your costs!

Limit the number of AdExchanges you target

AdExchanges are the intermediaries in the auction process, connecting the advertiser side – DSP – with the publisher side, or SSP. The trick is that most SSPs simultaneously make impressions available to most, if not all, of the popular AdExchanges. For advertisers to not exclude AdExchanges leads to the same double-bidding on one impression as using multiple DSPs.

You need to cut the long tail and seek to improve your Spend Conversion ratio.

Recommendation: Look at your AdExchange performance report and select the AdExchanges contributing to 75%+ of your traffic cumulatively.

Focus on website Inclusion lists, not Exclusion lists

I shared in SPN #77 that the average campaign runs on 44,000 websites. Madness! Realistically a mere 2,000 - 3,000 provide 99% of the volume and value. Inclusion lists can help streamline the number of websites on which ads appear.

Recommendation: Look at your website performance report and select the websites that drive 90% of your donations. Prioritize setting inclusion lists. Don’t look at Clicks or CTR as the measure of performance - that will lead to including a lot of fraudulent websites that are made to create bot clicks.

Form direct partnerships and use private auctions

Most DSPs offer private auction, or PMP, functionality in addition to the “standard” open market.

The cost of this inventory is almost always higher. However they usually provide higher-quality impressions.

Recommendation: Identify your website inclusion list, pick the top 5-10 performing sites and set up private auctions with them.

Be careful with viewability and brand safety solutions

Most DSPs have built-in functionality to exclude impressions based on their age rating, predicted viewability, and fraud rate. Those exact solutions are also available as add-ons, with DoubleVerify (DV) and Integral Ad Science (IAS) leading the market.

When implemented as an add-on solution, tags from the above two vendors are integrated into your creative tags in the AdServer e.g. Google Campaign Manager. While this seems to be a more accurate solution, there’s a profound difference in how DV or IAS work as add-ons versus when their data is selected as a targeting parameter within your DSP.

When implemented as add-ons, these brand safety solutions operate post-bid – in other words, they don’t prevent the ad auction from happening, instead preventing creative from being shown. When selected in DSPs, they operate as pre-bid solutions – preventing the ad auction from happening in the first place, therefore saving dollars.

Recommendation: Unless brand safety is your ultimate priority, implementing these tools as add-ons will inevitably lead to some percentage of your impressions being paid for but never actually viewed – a true definition of 100% waste!

Page Position targeting

The original version of viewability targeting was choosing impressions above or below the fold - in other words, ones shown on the page immediately after it’s loaded versus those requiring the user to scroll.

Targeting based on predicted viewability (available in most DSPs) costs extra money, racking up those supply chain inefficiencies, while targeting based on the page position is free.

Recommendation: If your media reports show significant performance differences between above-the-fold and below-the-fold impressions, picking above-the-fold targeting for your entire campaign can be a great way to save money.

Reduce Carbon Waste

Advertising contributed 1.76% of the total carbon emissions. That’s an uncomfortably large number.

ANA cited Scope3, a new(ish) venture of the ex-AppNexus CEO, which focuses on measuring and helping reduce your impressions’ carbon footprint. The downside is it’s an extra cost that likely isn’t affordable for most Org’s but it’s at least an important consideration, especially in this context.

Recommendation: By virtue of you implementing the recommendations mentioned above, your campaigns’ carbon footprint will go down because you’re using fewer intermediaries. That’s a solid start.

That’s all for today!

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Now onto the interesting stuff!