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In this week’s SPN:
Creative volume is the new media buying superpower
A POV on Andromeda - the new Meta update
Evolving an agency relationship - pay and expectations
Underrated levers that drive results
and, plenty of Jobs & Opps that took my fancy this week
Let’s jump in!
Feed the Children onboarded Fundraise Up in a near record-breaking 6 weeks. Soon after they were enjoying significant revenue gains:
- Increased monthly giving by 31%
- Landed 25% more donations during Giving Tuesday
- Achieved an incremental $40k revenue bump in just 3 months from adopting FRU features
“If I was sitting down with a counterpart in the industry to talk about moving to Fundraise Up, I’d ask them one question. Why haven’t you done it yet?!”
- VP, Digital Fundraising and Transformation, Harper Grubbs
You don’t even need to take my word for it now! Reach out to Fundraise Up to inject some rocket fuel into your fundraising.
AdTech
The latest Luma report on Digital Media and Marketing Tech for Q1 landed last week. The intro sums up a troubling scene:
The big issues remain. The WSJ wrote about Efforts to Weed Out Fake Users for Online Advertisers falling short. In a market where spend is scrutinized these issues can become excuses (and reasons) to cut back. Improving measurement is another - but the ANA backed Aquila looks promising.
Curiously, by the looks of my social feeds this week, most Org’s haven’t yet noticed the biggest Meta update since iOS14.
-> Meta Andromeda (supercharged Advantage +) has shifted how FB serves ad inventory. And “profit optimization” has arrived.
Andromeda represents a significant technological leap in retrieval – addressing challenges with key ML and system innovations.
The platform has shifted from demographics, lookalikes and granular audience-based target to individual level, AI-driven delivery.
Meta knows your content preferences better than you do - and is now serving content based on these individual level preferences. You may prefer a static ad, a GIF or a carousel. I may prefer a narrative-driven program beneficiary story that lasts 5 minutes. Either way what this clearly means is that to drive the best results via this new algorithm, you need to prioritize two things:
Content Volume AND Content Variety.
A high volume of distinctly different assets, across all stages of awareness phases, underpinned by the messaging frameworks that drive your core donors to convert. That’s what wins, and that’s what the best Org’s who are continuing to weather the storm of 2025 will be able to deliver.
Media buying is no longer about manually forcing outcomes. It’s about feeding Meta’s algorithm with as many high-quality creative options as possible, and letting its machine learning engine do the rest.
Enter: Cost per Winning Asset -> The only KPI that matters for creative + performance teams in 2025. Not ROAS. Not CTR. Just, how many ads does it take to find one that scales?
Meta just made one thing abundantly clear: the future of ad performance is creative volume. Not cost caps.
Meta’s not looking at the last 7 days. It’s analyzing 15 years of user behavior, scrolls, clicks, purchases, friend graphs, reactions... everything. And matching that to thousands of creative variations in real time.
Has your agency evolved its structure recently to meet what is a very new era of media buying? It’s a red flag if you haven’t seen any re-engineering of internal pods across strategy, account management, creative, and media buying. They’re very likely not set up to fully support Meta’s shift toward performance-led creative if they haven’t had an internal re-jig. Your external partners need to be organized in such a way as to generate the volume Meta’s AI now demands.
You might even think about paying your agencies differently. A % of spend model would reflect and support this recent shift, for instance. Less upfront risk for you, but higher potential upside for an agency. If you already have this model in place, are you sure it was the correct model for your previous approach? How often are you revisiting your terms and expectations with your Partners?
I’m not advocating for pushing higher media budgets. Rather the thinking needs to center around aligning incentives to what actually drives results: creative performance.
This is a new era of media buying and it’s not about pipes or bid caps anymore.
You and your Partners need to be fueling Meta’s algorithm with creative inputs that scale. This is also a note to self!
Overrated & Underrated Places to Invest Your Resources
One of the reasons second-time Fundraising & Marketing Leaders can usually put some early wins on the board quickly is they know exactly what to focus on, what to avoid, which Partners to work with, which levers to pull and what to ignore.
There’s so much noise, and if you work at an Org then you know from the 30+ cold email solicitations you receive weekly that there’s a lot of things you could be tinkering with.
No doubt there’s a time and place for something like sponsoring a beach volleyball tournament in Long Beach, CA that will air on ESPN, but it doesn’t mean you need to be spending your time on direct response fundraising like that.
Most of the things we should be focused on are accurately measured (acquisition, retention, donor file, engagement, etc). When I sit on airplanes I find myself writing lists. So here I am at 35,000 feet writing a list of immediate things I see teams spending time on that are utterly overrated.
I also added a few items that are extremely underrated that when I’ve implemented have shown immediate return. If there’s anything you’d add to be overrated or underrated, reply with it and I’ll add it in an updated version.
Overrated
Reach & Frequency campaigns.
Unless you’ve fully exhausted your potential with conversion-objective campaigns or you’re spending a ton of money ($10M+ on digital advertising), there’s no reason to run Reach & Frequency campaigns. Yes, there are points as you scale your spending where you find diminishing returns. Even in those cases, just running in-platform TOF doesn’t necessarily fix that - you can still run “TOF” ads optimizing for different top-of-funnel donation conversion events, reflective of an upper funnel prospect.
Programmatic display ads.
99% of programmatic ad tech companies are fibbing to you about the numbers in their reporting. They use long attribution windows, view-through-based reporting numbers and will often times arbitrage the inventory cost itself, resulting in trashy inventory for your ads to be displayed in.
If you run with a vendor and they have a 90-day view through window, they’re going to get credit for almost every donation conversion! Let companies like Pottery Barn continue to spend their dollars there, while you focus on social, search, and maybe one other channel.
Contracts for platforms.
Don’t overpay for a database of influencers and don’t lock yourself into 12-month agreements, with no out-clauses.
Most paid UGC is garbage.
If you open Reels or TikTok yourself, you’ll quickly realize how good the average piece of For You Page content is... that’s what you’re competing against. You can’t pay a random “UGC creator” $150 for a video where they pretend to love your Org or program and try to ask for a donation. People today know a fake ad or fake endorsement from a mile away; then you’ll blame “ads” for not working.
Sporadic influencer and event marketing.
Influencers are constantly flooding Orgs’ DMs and inboxes with requests to partner up and work together. Same for events companies - they’re always reaching out for sponsorships. Unless you have a proper strategy of how you plan to approach influencer and event marketing, don’t waste your dollars on random posts or random dinners. $1,500 here, $5,000 here, $12,500 here and you’ll end up spending over six-figures with no attributable incremental revenue from it.
A trick from when I worked at UNICEF - we would always reply back to events and offer them free swag for an event raffle on at-table gift, in exchange for social tags and content. They always said yes and waived fees.
Non-net-new donor acquisition.
Yes, new channels come around and become the talk of the town quickly, but understand how those channels interact with your Org and current channels and messaging in market. As long as your Org is set up to fully deliver on its promise, focus on spending against only net new donors.
Paying PR agencies egregious amounts of money.
Instead of spending $12,000 per month on a PR agency to get you into online publications that no one reads, spend that money on an agency that will help you light up 500 to 1,000 videos on short-form content platforms per day. The everyday Org fundraising with video or live stream content is the new PR.
Underrated
Increasing your email and SMS opt-in rate.
Klaviyo data suggests the average is 3% opt-in for email. Most brands get to 5-6%. Work to get to 15%. I’ve done it. That difference of 15% vs 6% is a lot of low-hanging digital revenue just sitting there.
Syndicating your content.
Being aggressive about collecting donor testimonials, especially from monthly pledge donors and even Corporate Partners, is one thing, but then making sure you’re syndicating those reviews across different publisher sites is equally as important. Social proof matters. Make sure when you market about how many donor testimonials you have, you have a collective total you can boast with.
Finding new messaging angles.
Testing new messaging angles, new creatives, new audiences, even new Match offers to find a new pool to go after can be the biggest lever for scaling. Back to UNICEF, when we found an ad angle for upgrades to monthly it generated 7 figures in revenue. How can you make your Org the obvious choice to solve someone’s desire to help?
Replying to all ad comments on Meta.
There’s a direct correlation between CTR being up, CPM being down, and CPA being down when you’re constantly replying to every single ad comment. Once you outgrow your ability to keep up, hire someone to help you keep up. It’s a necessary hire and nods directly to donor experience.
Optimized PDP experiences.
If you sell any swag or product on Shopify’s Shop app, TikTok Shop, Meta Shops, Amazon, wherever - it’s essential to make sure that donors have everything they need on all the product pages, product image carousels, reviews, etc. A bad product display page is equally a reflection of the Org itself, not just the marketplace.
First-order profitability.
Keep a keen eye on donor acquisition costs. Optimize for lifetime value.
OK, that’s all for today.
Let me know if there’s anything you’d add to either list. I hope you’ve found one nugget today that you can put into play next week.
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And huge thanks to this Quarter’s sponsor Fundraise Up for creating a new standard for online giving.
