I have worked with a number of organisations to develop their social media strategy, and increase reach, engagement and results on their social channels. My approach is to use a combination of paid and organic strategy, focusing on Facebook as the primary channel.
Facebook Ad campaigns
Some of the results I’ve achieved with Facebook Ads:
| Organisation | Campaign objective | Results |
| Barnardos Ireland – multiple campaigns | Supporter acquisition | Campaigns list built from 5k to over 12k through multiple lead campaigns – including petitions, open letters and surveys |
| Mental Health Ireland | Content marketing | 1600 leads acquired, at €0.49 per lead |
| Merchant’s Quay Ireland | Fundraising | 2.2k new subscribers, 6% converted to donors |
| Depaul Ireland | Supporter acquisition | 6k leads acquired for mailing list, at €0.17 per lead |
If you want a Facebook ad campaign, there’s a few things you’ll need to get started:
| Time | 6 weeks lead in time – to develop strategy, develop creative, get ads through Facebook’s approval process, run testing phase, run campaign |
| Strategy | Clear strategic goals – do you want conversions, leads? What kind of conversions? (‘Awareness’ is not a strategic goal because it’s too difficult to properly measure.) |
| Creative | Each campaign needs a minimum of 15 ads for split testing, we’ll need to find or create 5 images or videos |
| Tech | The Facebook Pixel must be installed on your website and on any third party services you’re using as part of the user journey |
| Budget | A budget of €100 – €200 for the testing phase, and a max budget based on cost per acquisition and targets. I recommend a minimum budget of €500. |
I get asked to do last minute Facebook Ad campaigns a lot; however unless you have a high organic reach and a large engaged audience on your Facebook Page already, a last minute campaign is very unlikely to deliver results.
Facebook is the most powerful and sophisticated advertising channel in the world; Facebook also makes it much too easy to set up pointless and wasteful campaigns that just chase reach and impressions and fail to deliver any real return. My advice to non-profits is to develop a strong digital and social media strategy, and just run a few strategic, properly tested campaigns each year. Building your team’s skills in Facebook Ads is one of the most useful things you can do, as it means you can leverage this powerful tool without having to pay agency fees, and constantly learn from your experiments.
Sources for learning about Facebook Ads:
- Digital Charity Lab has a podcast and downloadable strategic guide, on how charities can develop effective Facebook Ad campaigns
- A guest post I wrote for Fundraising Space, with recommendations for organic vs paid Facebook activity
- Some training that I’ve heard good things about is the RaiseThru programme.
- 90% of what I know about Facebook Ads, I learned from Adrian O’Flynn. His ebooks are free and invaluable. Don’t miss his post on how to acquire regular givers through Facebook.
- Adrian strongly recommends the Ecommerce Influence podcast with Andrew Foxwell