Tennyson Center for Children
Targeted Social Video Advertising Campaign Raises End-of-Year Funds
Challenge
Drumming up a strong push for donation interest at the end of the year can be an uphill battle. Donors and readers are generally fatigued as a result of holiday messaging from various brands and a slew of requests from nonprofits for end-of-year and/or tax-deductible donations. It’s a crowded online space and the signal-to-noise ratio is high, especially in Colorado regarding Colorado Gives Day, a single day in Denver devoted to donating to local nonprofits. GFM|CenterTable was tasked with building a compelling digital advertising campaign that bypassed the crowded Colorado Gives Day space and instead utilized the platforms of our client, the Tennyson Center for Children, which provides mental, behavioral and residential treatment services for children who have experienced abuse, neglect and trauma.
Solution
We began by overlaying Tennyson Center’s existing donor list into Facebook, which allowed us to instantly identify and target 90 percent of the nonprofit’s most loyal followers. We used that built-in following to create a lookalike audience that was limited to the geographical areas Tennyson serves in Denver and Weld counties. This provided a highly specified audience of more than 500,000 in targeted areas that had either expressed direct interest or the propensity for interest in the Tennyson Center’s mission. Using a two-pronged creative approach of narrative videos featuring Tennyson Center’s current and former CEOs telling inspiring and deeply personal stories about why they become involved with the organization and photos of equally moving murals painted by Tennyson Center students that told their stories of recovery, GFM|CenterTable successfully illustrated the meaningful mission and children in need that donors would be benefiting. Meeting the first goal of identifying engaged audience members, the strategy and creative campaign successfully converted these leads to interact with donation messaging.
Results
Running this campaign’s dual approach of engagement and conversion for five weeks at a total cost of around $3,000, the Facebook ad campaign reached more than 120,000 people in our highly-targeted audience, 25,000 of whom directly engaged with the campaign on Facebook. In the end, GFM|CenterTable directly drove 103 of the 183 donations to a fundraiser that produced nearly $150,000 for the Tennyson Center for Children.
120,000
Reached more than 120,000 people
103
Directly drove 103 of the 183 donations to the fundraiser
150,000
The fundraiser produced nearly $150,000 for the Tennyson Center for Children