Direct Fundraising Matters

Last year, I got an email in the midst of election season asking if I would be interested in coming on board to act as US Digital Ad Manager for a nonprofit I happened to know fairly well. I have some friends on internal staff there, and I knew I definitely wanted to work with them if I had the chance, so even while running a whole agency’s election season paid media and other small things here and there, I agreed with the understanding that starting in September, I would have limited capacity through election day due to my prior commitments.

I was excited to jump on board because I knew I was replacing a big name agency that had somewhere around a $10,000 a month retainer. The agency wasn’t bringing in direct donations at scale, but they claimed a lot of view-through revenue (see the bottom of this post for definitions of direct donations vs view-through). What they were bringing in on direct donations wasn’t even meeting the cost of their services each month. I was pretty sure I could do a better job, and I could certainly do it cheaper. Our results have been pretty great, if I do say so myself.

Overall, comparing the last quarter of 2024 to the last quarter of 2023, I was able to more than double direct revenue from ads even when you drop out large gifts that came through an ad. My program also had more than 5 times the number of donations. We did have a drop in average donation size, which occurred across the board for the org (anecdotally, I feel fairly sure we drove more first time donors via ads, which may account for part of it).

Choosing to put our ad dollars into generating direct revenue meant more actual money from ad sources came in the door. At the same time, email did not drop at all, in fact, they raised more in EOY 2024 than they did in 2023. Admittedly, ad revenue may never be a huge part of the overall income compared to email, but going from 3% to 6.5% makes a real difference.

Aside from raising more money, we had some other wins in the ad program that I’m particularly proud of:

On Meta when we ran Direct to Donate ads, we met or exceeded CPA goals, and our acquisition ads far exceeded our CPA goal, coming in at an average $1.52 at scale.

On Google Search, we successfully implemented an Intent to Donate search campaign that the agency could not do. Intent Search is, in this case, when someone is searching for an organization to donate to in the area of service, but does not necessarily know which organization they want to donate to. We ended up driving over 1600 clicks to the website in the last quarter of the year, and had a ROAS of 89.5% with a CPC nearly $2 cheaper than the failed agency campaign.

The Fundraising team wanted to also run Brand Search to make sure anyone searching for the organization had an easy to find donation link, and we increased both traffic (by ~900 clicks) and cost efficiency (over $3 cheaper CPC) from the agency’s work, plus we were ROAS profitable at 120%!

It is admittedly hard to compare one year to another, apples to apples, because different events that happen in the world can have an impact to national fundraising programs, but by every metric, we had a successful EOY and from an ads perspective, I think it comes down to focusing on driving direct donations. It’s pretty much impossible to optimize when you focus on view-through conversions, hoping for action taken later. When you have tangible results, you can make informed decisions, like pushing content that’s working well, pivoting when you need to, and it allows for making the most out of a client’s budget with returns that are there right away.

So, TLDR: don’t let anyone tell you ads programs can’t bring in new donors or bring in direct revenue. They can, and they should.

Direct donations mean the donation came right from a donor clicking on an ad. We can actually source that donation to the specific platform, audience, and ad unit.

View-Through Conversions are indirect. In a fundraising context, it means that someone saw an ad, and then later decided to donate. These often end up being folks who are already on the email list, who later donate via the email program - maybe even a month later. Conventional marketing psychology applies here, often for selling products, keeping a brand or a product top of mind for a consumer means they’re more likely to buy that brand or product. I haven’t done extensive testing on this in a non-profit context, but what I have personally worked on thus far shows there may be a correlation toward an increase in donation amount, but does not seem to have an impact on the number of donations. It certainly doesn’t do much to help a non-profit if an agency is only targeting existing donors who are likely to give regardless. As such, I am personally skeptical that budgeting for this type of marketing is particularly useful for non-profit organizations, but much of the marketing community believes in this approach. I just haven’t seen real proof it works for charitable projects.