SPN. 131: How to Turbo-Charge Fundraising with Better Creative

Plus, top 10 posts of 2024; the evolution of Growth Marketer to Creative Strategist; Jobs that took my fancy this week

Dec 16, 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.

Want to know how we reduced donor support hours at UNICEF in the U.S. and lowered our digital donor attrition rate? We provided donors with a better experience.

Fundraise Up’s Donor Portal makes it so easy for donors to edit their payment details and adjust their monthly giving amount and even change the donation date. All without having to call or email someone.

And shout out to the automatic prompts to “pause” recurring plans instead of “cancelling” them - they’re worth their weight in gold!

Game-changer? It was for me!

In this week’s SPN →

Top 10 Posts of 2024
Crafting crystal clear creative briefs
How to turbo-charge your Fundraising with better creative
Evolving the Growth Marketer role

and, plenty of jobs that took my fancy this week.

Let’s jump in!

Explore: Build Your Tech Stack (link)

Searching for new tools or trying to trim down your tech stack? Play around in this infographic. I add to it most weeks.

Jobs & Opps 🛠️

Philharmonic Society of Orange County: Vice President of Fundraising ($150,000 - $165,000)

Smithsonian Institute: Assistant Director, Advancement Comms & Marketing ($163,964 - $191,900)

National Gallery: Director, Visitor Experience Operations ($139,395 - $191,900)

Wikimedia Foundation: Senior Analyst, Fundraising Data & Analytics ($102,437 to $161,869)

The Underline: Chief Development Officer

GoFundMe: Senior Director, Integrated Marketing ($229,000 - $312,500)

The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society: Manager Digital Direct Giving Direct to Constituent ($95,000 - $137,000)

UNICEF UK: Online Platforms Product Owner (£53,000)

Internet Society: Director of Corporate Fundraising

Earth Justice: Senior Director, Digital Fundraising & Engagement ($169,400 – $221,400)

Mayo Clinic: Senior Director, Development ($177,000 - $265,000)

The Rockefeller Foundation: Managing Director, Special Projects & Partnerships ($185,872 - $247,186)

The Asian American Foundation: Salesforce Project Manager ($100,000)

→ More jobs updated daily to SPN’s sister website: www.pledgr.com

Turbo-Charge Your Fundraising with Better Creative

The different forms of creative your Org puts out (ads, emails, landing pages, social posts, etc.) will make-or-break your mission in the eyes of your Supporters.

Here’s some context, otherwise scroll down for the 18 creative nuggets I’ve learnt that drives some serious incremental revenue growth:

The only way to make your mission stand out when earning a donation, is by the brand and creative you have supporting it. Think about two products: Evian and Liquid Death. It’s the exact same product, the same drivers even… but the creative that surrounds the product is what makes you decide which one you drink and support as a customer.

That’s a 30,000-foot thought but we also know in digital fundraising that more robust creative = lower CPAs, higher CTRs, and more efficiencies from your ad spend.

It also means more brand affinity and donor loyalty, higher trust, and typically more word-of-mouth marketing and ambassadors for you, too. If your creative is good, people will organically share it. If your creative is bad, even unintentionally, your Org will immediately lose your most valuable resource – trust.

This doesn’t mean you need highly produced visuals in order to succeed. It means that you need to show the proof that what you’re saying drives meaningful impact.

Creative is the bridge between donors and your Org. Great creative makes donors want to cross your bridge, enter your site/funnel and actually donate. You can also think of creative like a magnet where good creative attracts the right donors and repels the wrong ones.

Bad creative is like having dirty, mud-covered windows on your storefront. You might have great products or programs inside, but the first impression is that your brand looks terrible and they can’t view the value inside.

This is all to say that your creative is what Supporters see first, and it’s really the face of your brand. No one sees your donor services, IT, Ops, fires burning in your Org. They see your creative, your website, ads, etc., which is why it’s so important (maybe even the most important) thing to get right!

So with that in mind, I wanted to spend this week sharing 18 nuggets to keep in mind for better creative →

Without further ado

1. Follow the REACT framework: A few years ago, our team cottoned onto an acronym to describe building the perfect funnel - Reporting, [site] Experience, Audience [targeting], Creative, Technology. REACT. Think of this framework like a casino game where you need to find the matching emoji in a horizontal line, but in this case, it’s about testing different variables across REACT. Specifically, different audiences, different creatives, different site experiences to see which works. With that in mind, develop creative that can be tested with multiple audiences or donation asks.

2. Make data-driven decisions: Everything I’ve ever learned about marketing has told me that my creative opinions about what I think looks good or is working is totally subjective!

In 2020, I ran an ad where a YouTuber cut into an unboxing with a large knife, and my CMO said we had to turn it off - it’s off-brand. That ad was bringing us the lowest CPA at the time. You have to follow performance data and use that data to make decisions on where to continue producing. Whether it’s specific angles, audiences or styles of creative, double down on what works and cut the low performers.

3. Test continuously: I test new ad creatives once a week for any Org’s I run media for. It allows the creative team to continuously test new images, videos, whitelisted ads, advertorials, GIFs, etc., every week. In most Org accounts, 10% of the creative you upload has a real shot at becoming a true scaling piece of creative, so it’s important to continue making shots on goal to find that winner.

4. Realize that the creative IS the targeting: Back in the day, ad platforms like Meta had incredibly granular targeting parameters, and the best media buyers knew the art and science of how to create custom or behavioral audiences to win for their brand.

Nowadays, AI-enabled ad algorithms and setups like Advantage+, Pmax, and Smart campaigns mean that most of the targeting is done by AI — the creative IS now the targeting. If you show an elderly man in your ad creative, Meta will find users who look like that image or have interacted with similar content and serve it to them. Creative is now the most critical variable in ensuring you reach the end audience you desire.

5. Run multiple creatives for multiple audiences: With that in mind, you should be running creatives with different people to reach new donor cohorts: young, middle-aged, older, animal lovers, X enthusiasts, etc.

6. Run multiple angles: This is pretty straightforward, but beyond the people featured, you also want to have several different ads with different messaging and angles running all the time. Think of at least 5-10 different ways to position and message your programs and Org.

7. Optimize the landing page experience: Once users click through to your site, you want them to have a seamless value add experience on your LP. Match the creative and messaging on the landing page to the ad itself. For example, if the ad says “Help send food this Holiday” the header text on the landing page should be the same. You can do this in Meta, for example, by creating dynamic UTM parameters that include the headline from the ad, which then tells the landing page what to read in the headline container (Unbounce does this well).

8. Use Motion to measure creative performance: Motion is a tool I’m quickly becoming addicted to! They provide much deeper analytics on watch time, hooks and angle performance, click rates from which second of the video, etc than I’ve come across elsewhere. If you spend $25k+ per month on ads, you want to use a creative analytics tool like Motion to assess performance. This will make your creative, media, and fundraising teams more effective and unified.

9. Provide clear briefs for creative teams: An excellent creative brief includes hooks, examples from other ads (even links to those ads in ads library), brand guidelines, main talking points, the intended audience, copy you see performing well in your account, Match details, the aspect ratios/sizes, and any other relevant info. The better you can make your creative briefs, the faster you will make better ads for your Org.

10. Embrace lo-fi creatives: Don’t sleep on the concept of lower-production level stuff. If anything, some of the best ad performances come from creatives that feel really “cheap” or low-budget. They feel more authentic and relatable to most users, and they feel more contextually native to the feed they’re in — think about the videos that sell products on TikTok Shop.

You should be testing more lo-fi creative with iPhone-shot videos, donor generated content testimonials, iMessage screenshots, Tweet screenshots, etc. They all work and they’re super easy to stand up, even without a creative team.

11. Highlight Match promos clearly: If your ad features a Match make sure that offer is visible upfront in the ad. You should include it in the ad’s copy and also overlay visuals and stickers on landing pages or program pages you drive to.

12. Ride relevant social trends: The easiest way to make banger ads is to see what’s already working on social. If there are funny hooks, skits, formats, memes, jokes, sounds, music, etc., that are trending, lean in. I keep an eye on what’s getting engagement or driving sales among TikTok Shop products, and often start their for inspo.

13. Optimize for mobile first: All visuals, text, and call-to-action buttons need to be optimized for mobile first. This means using larger text, shorter copy, and simple CTAs to drive higher click throughs on smaller screens. This applies to your landing pages too - make sure your site loads for a grandpa’s iPhone 11 with terrible internet connection.

14. Make Match offers time sensitive to drive urgency: When using Match offers, consider adding an expiration to drive urgency (e.g., “This Week Only” or “Limited March Funds”) so prospective donors want to click and take advantage today. This same tactic works like a charm in email subject lines and email capture pop-ups.

15. Incorporate reviews and social proof: The best ads include social proof. Either as a direct donor testimonial or with some type of social proof validation like “Join 5,000+ donors this month” or “Over 25,000 cartons of food delivered.”

Pushing how many reviews you have is the holy grail in restaurant marketing, but really you just want to emphasize a large number and link it to either those who have helped (donors), or those impacted (beneficiaries), or impact delivered (programs).

16. Make a creative asset library for your team: Build a Google Drive folder of all creative assets, past ads, email creatives, organic social posts, and large-scale campaigns for quick reference and reuse.

And take the time to label these correctly. File organization is a pain, but credit to those around me because it saves so many hours and headaches when I want to find something made six months ago because I remember liking how we positioned something and can only see it in my minds eye! It’s worth it.

17. Embrace the Creative Strategist role: As ad platforms become more and more automated, I’ve seen the rise of the creative strategist role become super important for consumer brands over the past few years.

I had two people on my team at unicef perform this role with absolute distinction. They essentially sat between the digital fundraising and brand teams.

The role is to be almost a creative-focused data cruncher - understand what the platform analytics are saying and translate that into briefs for the creative team to execute. This role, to me, is the evolution of the growth marketer role. And it’s fun!

18. Study what other winning Orgs are doing: Facebook Ads Library, TikTok Ads Library, Google Ads Library, Adbeat, all exist on the internet as a free resource. Go find what the best ads look like and start ideating based on patterns or frameworks you see work.

If you go to pledgr.com and then its Nonprofit Directory, for example Canadian Red Cross, scroll down on their profile and alongside their financials and brand book, you’ll see under “Ad Transparency” the ads they’ve currently got in market. Good ones they are too!

(Let me know if you don’t see your Org there or have updated docs you’d like me to switch in and I’ll sort it asap).

OK, that’s all for today.

I hope you’ve found one thing in today’s SPN that you can make your own and drive your desired impact.

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And huge thanks to this Quarter’s sponsor Fundraise Up for creating a new standard for online giving.

Reads From My Week

Alex Collmer - Founder & CEO at VidMob - on Creative Data Is Getting Easier to Use

Creativity isn’t Child’s Play, Lessons from Crayola (Forbes)

Warc have a good podcast episode giving the “Brand view of media effectiveness” (WARC)

Introducing Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era (Google)

Media & Entertainment Industry Predictions Report 2025 (AlixPartners)

“The vibe may be British, but the money is not”: how the US quietly conquered UK TV (Guardian)

This Year Next Year: 2024 Global End-of-Year Forecast (GroupM)

How Two Irreverent Historians Made Their Podcast a Global Sensation (WSJ)

Trends: the searches that shaped 2024, from Google Trends (Google)

Big Ideas in Tech for 2025 (Andreessen Horowitz)

Google unveils ‘mindboggling’ quantum computing chip (BBC)

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