Click to Donate Campaign for NGO
Notes on my learnings running a click to donate campaign on Meta
In the last few weeks, I did my best to share almost all my learnings as a digital fundraising consultant. All that I had gained in the last two years. In this process, I shared about:
Digital Fundraising for NGO: In this first blog post I shared my learnings on how to acquire new donors via Meta( Facebook and Instagram). This covered everything so in my later blog posts I decided to break it down and go a bit deep.
Ad Creatives on Meta: Creatives are the soul of any kind of fundraising campaign. Here I have shared my learnings on ad creatives for Meta.
Lead Generation campaign for NGO: Once your creative strategy is sorted, the next thing you do is decide your fundraising routes. Lead Generation is one of them. So here I shared my learnings on running a lead generation campaign.
And in my final post here are my learnings on running a click-to-donate campaign for an NGO.
Creatives
I have already shared about creatives and why they are the soul of any kind of fundraising campaign.
Make sure you have a compelling story that will motivate your target audience to come forward and donate.
At any given time test a maximum of 5 creatives - 2 videos and 3 statics.
Some NGOs feel that the creatives should be clean and avoid talking about donations. Creatives should stand out be it static or video. However, when you are watching an ad on mobile the chances are that your audience might just miss out. So A/B test your creatives: with and without donation ask and see what works.
One Off and Regular Giving
One Off is your one-time giving and Regular Giving is when a donor decides to give the NGO on a monthly basis. While regular giving or monthly giving might be appealing but an NGO will have to communicate why a donor should give monthly and what is she getting for such a commitment.
On a monthly basis, I pay Prime and Netflix because I get entertainment. Similarly, an NGO will have to build a case on the “Why”.
However, RBI regulations on how Internet companies can deduct monthly fees from debit or credit card has impacted the regular giving for NGOs. So most of them have preferred one-off or one-timing giving. Starting with one-offs and then converting donors into regular giving is an effective way.
Donation Page
For a click-to-donate campaign donation page is the backbone. Once the targeted audience has clicked on the ad she is diverted to the donation page where the rest of the process is completed. This involves:
Communicating about the campaign - why, how the money will be used and other relevant details to gain donor confidence
Capturing of personal details and the donation amount
The payment process by triggering the bank servers
Finally, after a successful transaction, showcasing the thank you page to the donor
So the page should not only be mobile optimized but light too so that the NGO can reduce any unnecessary drops because of an ineffective donation page.
The donation amount showcased on the donation page is very crucial. Digital in India is a volumes game unlike TV so make sure your donation pages have donation amounts ranging between ₹1000-₹5000.
Ideally, people in India tend to give between ₹1000-₹2000. Don’t forget to keep a minimum limit on the donation and ₹1000 is good.
For creating an effective donation page please check NextAfter’s template.
Pixel
Don’t start your click-to-donate campaign on Meta without a pixel on your donation page. I generally would have the code that would pick the total number of donation page views and the successful donation value along with the currency.
Once you have your pixel installed you can test via your ad manager or you have browser extensions like Meta Pixel Helper.
Pixel is important not only for optimising but also for reporting.
Unsuccessful Donations
For a click-to-donate campaign, on average you will have 20-30% unsuccessful donations. They could be a number of reasons and you can check your bank server and payment gateway report. But this is something you can’t avoid but how do you take care of them? Since even a 10% conversion will bring a good impact on the ROI.
The NGO has personal details so either they can reach out via email or phone. Reaching out to donors via email in such a case isn’t an effective solution. Having a call center in place for unsuccessful donations is the best solution.
ROI
Donation page views and cost can all be good-looking metrics but eventually, it boils down to how much money was raised at what media spends.
In my experience daily spends of INR 20,000 to 25,000 per day, i.e. INR 600,000 to 700,000 monthly on Meta can achieve a monthly ROI of 1.0 to 1.3. This is just an average and they fluctuate.
Additionally, the cause, creatives, ad targeting, donation page, etc. all play an important role. You can’t control the giving nature of people but you can optimise and keep testing. You will find a sweet spot when you will make good ROI but again that won’t be permanent too.
Additionally, don’t make frequent changes in the ad targeting. The moment you do that the campaign goes into the learning phase and it impacts the ROI. This is also a way where Meta makes more money.
Finally, if your ad manager account isn't blocked two or three times then you can’t proclaim yourself as a digital fundraising consultant 🙂 Just be patient it will take 7 to 10 days since Meta’s support is very slow but it will work out if you are patient and persistent.
And just like that now you can run a digital fundraising campaign for your NGO or hire a freelancer/agency to do so while you understand how in general things work.