SPN. 160: My swipe file -> landing pages, email flow, campaign inspo, ad creative and copywriting
Plus, is reach still king for branding?
A very warm welcome to all the new subscribers and a happy long weekend to those in the US. You’ve joined a community of over 3k marketing and fund raising operators at mission-driven Org’s. I’m thrilled to have you as readers and truly appreciate your feedback and support.
In this week’s SPN:
A framework for modern creative thinking
Is reach still king for branding?
My swipe file: landing pages, email flow, campaign inspo, ad creative and copywriting
And, plenty of Jobs & Opps!
More Donations, Fewer Barriers
When International Justice Mission UK upgraded to Fundraise Up, they modernized their donation experience AND unlocked real results:
76% increase in conversion rate
2x more monthly recurring donors
50% increase in gift size
These are massive numbers!
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✨ “We’ve seen improvements in every metric that matters.” - IJM UK
Are you ready to deliver more digital fundraising revenue for your Org?
👉 Go explore the Fundraise Up platform.
Chart of the Week
What this chart screams to me is that mobilizing - at the very least exploring - new funding routes, prioritizing investments (perhaps of new kinds) and redesigning the global development system couldn’t be more critical work today, in order to be using available resources to far greater effect.
Let’s get to work!
Creative
An SPN reader shared a good framework for modern creative thinking with me and I thought you’d enjoy it too.
1. BIG ORGANIZING IDEA
In a “lots of littles” world, remember everything needs to ladder to something bigger. “Greater than the sum of its parts”.
2. DISTINCTIVE ASSETS
Early and often. Branding in creator content is not the enemy it’s often made out to be.
3. DEFINED ROLE IN THE FUNNEL
Don’t treat creators as a strategy. Treat them as a tactic to support specific objectives.
The Drum published a decent take on creativity from a System1 exec this week:
This doesn’t mean digital is shit and doesn’t build brand, it means some metrics some marketers rely on don’t work.
In fact, given that a lot of digital media is skippable and has rather affordable reach, the creative dividend here is massive. If you can use creativity to game this system, to work out ways to get more attention and leave a strong impression quickly, you will win where other brands fail.
I’ve been banging on about the power of creative since SPN #1 and it’s always a little depressing when you ask a Brand team at an Org who does the creative and you get the standard answers - freelancers, a team in Lithuania who do them overnight, the intern, the agency sent us cutdowns of the video, the media owner is doing them for free etc etc.
It’s clear creative advertising has to be a core competence or delivered through a strong partnership with experts.
I got into a debate around whether reach is still king for branding. What do you think? Here’s one take:
I think the answer is: it depends. Two extremes: yogurt and luxury timepieces. If you’re selling Chobani, consumers are in market literally every week. And there is great switch-ability between a broad set of alternative brands, flavors and formats. Broad reach, always on low frequency makes sense.
If you’re Breitling, your customer has to be able to afford the product, and is likely in market once in ten years around key life stage events. It’s luxury/fashion, with a very specific psychological profile. Broad reach makes no sense. Context/adjacency/association drives your timing and cadence.
Practically what does this mean for a nonprofit Operator?
Brand building is critical.
And it can and should look different depending on audience, market, interesting moments.
Match your media strategy to donor decision cycles.
Do you rely on impulse and emotional immediacy? Or are you guiding long-term consideration and high-value giving? Is it February or November?Segment by giving behavior and life stage.
Build trust and relevance thoughtfully. I’ve seen a recurring $25 donor turn into a $1M bequest many times.Bonus thought: Diversify
It’s easy to default to Facebook Ads or DRTV because they scale reach. But that’s not always where your most valuable donor decisions are made.
Bottom line
If reach is a strategy then relevance is a condition. But not all relevance is the same.
And the Q3 question we should be wrestling with isn’t “Is relevance important?” It’s what kind of relevance are we building and how does the media plan support it?
If reach is “who sees you,” then relevance is “why they care.” And depending on your donor, the path to engagement looks very different.
Weekly Reads 📚
What I learned after handing marketing to a gen Zer (Fast Company)
At 20 Years Old, Reddit Is Defending It’s Data and Fighting AI with AI (CNBC)
Did AI Companies Win a Fight With Authors? Technically (The Verge)
In Pursuit of Godlike Technology, Mark Zuckerberg Amps Up the AI Race (NYT)
Agentic Commerce for All (AdExchanger)
Cannes Lion Festival In Retrospective From An Industry Novice (AdExchanger)
What I Learned Trying Seven Coding Agents (Understanding AI)
Context Engineering vs. Prompt Engineering (Simon Willison)
As Job Losses Loom, Anthropic Launches Program To Track AI’s Economic Fallout (TechCrunch)
Cannes Lions Grand Prix Case Study Controversies and Withdrawals-Everything You Need to Know (AdAge)
Back Pocket Reference Library
Let me take you down a rabbit hole of inspiration!
Anytime there’s a long weekend, I spend a little extra time consuming print media and trying to get inspired by new ideas, etc., which gave me the thought to share some links that I regularly dip into during any given week.
Most of my “context” is derived from conversations with nonprofit operators, brand owners, other marketers, or my peers; but it’s these links that keep me on my toes and inspired to push for “more”. Whatever more is.
Landing Page Examples
Very few things gets me more excited than finding landing pages I can take inspiration from. I’ve made thousands of pages and seen tens of thousands, so finding inspiration is hard. It’s not always the prettiest landing pages that give me a good idea; sometimes it’s an old-school, direct-response-looking landing page driving from TV traffic.
Generally, when scanning pages, I’m looking for things that make me stop and want to learn more, or allow me to process information in a more organized or efficient way. The more efficiently you can make knowledge transfer with a landing page, the higher it will convert.
TV and TikTok landing pages tend to be the most direct-response-focused, but that’s where I like to find inspiration, knowing I can likely design it better with my team. If you watch any late-night cable TV, scan every QR code that pops up on a TV ad to see where they’re driving to, what UTMs they use, what the offer looks like, etc. I call these phone numbers too sometimes, just see how those automated systems work to process orders or how they approach you running through a telephonic version of a landing page.
When I can’t find new pages or examples right away, here are a few resources I like to use for landing page and website inspiration:
Loveable - if you’re starting to play around with AI and how AI can build better landing pages with/for you, start here.
Unbounce - I come here often.
Fermat’s Landing Page Guide - I’ve sought plenty of inspo from this guide over the years
The Lander Library (ads library for landing pages)
Awwwards - This site is just UI inspo, not UX inspo; aka, I don’t believe most of these sites are conversion-friendly.
Page Flows - Great UX inspo
Landbook - Website specific
As soon as I find something within a landing page that I connect with or that peaks my interest, I take a screenshot, add notes, and drop it into a group chat. Most landing page URLs don’t last forever (which is why I linked more libraries above); save them!
Email Flow & Campaign Inspiration
You wouldn’t run the same ad for 18 months, right?
So why are your email flows still stuck in 2022?
A few simple optimizations could unlock serious fundraising dollars that you’re currently missing out on. When I first start scaling retention programs for Org’s I audit everything automated or triggered.
Is it scheduled and set up to fire properly?
Does it have links that contain automatically applied Matches?
Does the pop-up fire on-site when you have traffic coming from email?
Are the subject lines truly optimized?
Could there be a way to swap a section of content to increase revenue or click-through rate (CTR)?
Here are a few websites I like to use to find what other brands are doing:
Really Good Emails - This is Facebook ads library for email.
Good Email Copy - Exactly what it sounds like!
Campaigns make a lot of money, but you’d be surprised how much more revenue your flows can be making you just by optimizing them slightly.
Copywriting Inspo
Good copy will make someone fall in love with your Org, not just want to donate to fuel your mission. My favorite copy is when Apple launches new products. I still remember when the MacBook Air first launched, the copy was, “Light. Years ahead.”
Apple consistently uses this style of headline writing to show multiple benefits with easy-to-understand and straightforward copy. They take 5th-grade-level writing and turn it into Shakespeare - it’s my favorite style of writing because it personifies the product with the largest TAM (due to the simplicity of the wording).
Here are some good places I like to get copy inspo from:
Ad Creative Inspiration
Candidly, I try my best to keep going to the websites of brands that I respect from a performance marketing standpoint and then wait to see what I get targeted with (either from them or their competitors).
Typically, when I can’t get served something, I’ll just go check out the ad libraries:
Another thing with ad creative is that I like to see how media companies and affiliates are marketing the same brands differently. They’re usually focused on driving conversion, and they tend to have a built-in audience, so their content feels more native.
A good example of this is looking at what TikTok Shop affiliates are doing and how they’re advertising certain products, or even seeing the Ads Library of MySubscriptionAddiction.
Here are some more resources for where I get inspiration for ads:
Sarah Levinger’s Ad Swipe File
I said this above but just to underline - the secret to finding the best ads is to make an DM group with 5-10 other marketers or teammates, and share the stuff you see. It’s also great gut check on what lands. Again, take screen recordings or screenshots and save them for later.
Thanks for making it to the end here.
I hope today’s SPN brought you a couple of golden nuggets that help you make an incremental six-figures in digital revenue. You’d be surprised. One improvement to post-donation email flows, adding a listicle module to your landing page, or changing how you approach the hooks to your organic content, can sometimes be the one change to make things click.
OK, 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 donor experience.
Now onto the fun stuff!
Jobs & Opps 🛠️
UK Government: Head of Impact Investing and Philanthropy (£70,845 - £78,192)
Climate Imperative Foundation: Chief Communications Officer ($265,000 - $275,000)
Wells Fargo: Head of Housing Access and Affordability Philanthropy ($173,000 - $359,000)
American Red Cross: Director, Program Strategy and Partnerships ($120,000 - $130,000)
Save the Children (USA): Managing Director, Marketing Performance, Technology, & Analytics ($131,750 – $147,250)
UNICEF USA: VP, Donor Marketing & Journeys ($184,000 - $230,000)
ALSAC (American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities): Director – Direct Mail Strategy
→ Check out the many job opportunities listed on SPN’s sister site: Pledgr