Nonprofit Digital Marketing Strategies for Q4 2019

This year, a late Thanksgiving Day on November 28th pushes Giving Tuesday to December 3rd. For Nonprofits looking to capitalize on the “day of giving,” there will surely be overlap with Holiday campaigns later in the month of December.

In order to make the most of this shortened window, there are a number of strategies that can be adopted to improve response and keep your media spend efficient. Here are four of our favorites that we are recommending to clients this season.

1) Plan for at least Seven Weeks

There is a seven-week period between the week before Giving Tuesday and the end of 2019. This window presents an opportunity for one, continual message for the entire Giving Season, keeping your organization front-and-centered the entire time.

Plan accordingly to have your end-of-year digital media budget stretch across this seven-week period. In addition, plan to target the same, onboarded audiences over this span.

Why an onboarded audience? Since an onboarded audience is set and known, you can be confident that targeted individuals are seeing your ads multiple times. The more frequent someone sees your ad, the more likely they are to respond.

2) Switch Creative on December 4th

If you are running Digital Media for an extended period of time, usually there is a point where your targeted audience becomes numb to your creative and glosses over it entirely. Typically, a “creative refresh” is recommended every few weeks to avoid this issue. However, with Giving Tuesday falling two weeks into this media plan, there is a natural pivot point.

Have creative specific to Giving Tuesday be at the forefront of any digital campaigns up to, and including, December 3rd. On December 4th, as Giving Tuesday is over, switch creative to be more holiday-focused. The creative refresh will bring a new wave of activity and engagement with your targeted audience, boosting response rates overall.

3) Consider a Donor-Suppression Strategy

What is the likelihood of individuals donating once for Giving Tuesday and once again just weeks later during the Holiday season? For some small-dollar donors, the propensity of two, frequent donations might be extremely low. Consider a suppression strategy of recent donors to ensure that your media budget is being spent as efficiently as possible, only targeting those who have not had the chance to give yet.

Look at your organization’s 2018 holiday season to see how many individuals donated twice between November and December. Do any patterns emerge in terms of donation amounts or channel in which the donations came in? Use this intelligence to decide if a donor suppression strategy makes sense. If it does, there are a couple ways in which this can be easily accomplished.

The first is an automated method where you can leverage Facebook’s or Google’s Conversion Pixels to exclude anyone who gave over this period from future targeting. The second, more manual method, is that on a weekly basis you onboard an exclusion audience to the various platforms.

4) Reach Your Audience on Multiple Platforms, Channels

Having only a Facebook campaign up-and-running is great, but to maximize response it is best to include multiple platforms and channels.

Instagram Stories is an exciting placement to attract donors under 35 years old. While the relatively freeform creative specifications can be intimidating, there are templates available for ads on Instagram Stories that allows you to revive your current content and make it look new and exciting.

If you are reaching out to current or lapsed donors, consider onboarding your file to Google and serve display ads. Better yet, if you have a compelling 15 or 30 second video, serve pre- and post-roll YouTube ads. Video can do an amazing job telling your organization’s story, and kindly remind individuals why they donated in the first place.

If you are looking to reach new donors, onboard a prospecting list to Facebook and deploy emails while that Facebook campaign is live. By leveraging multiple channels, you can increase your campaign’s reach and boost the likelihood of your message resonating.

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