Summary / objectives

Lung Foundation Australia wanted to increase their social media presence and drive awareness of their 2020 Christmas campaign, with an aim of converting click-throughs into donations.

Creator / originator

Lung Foundation Australia (LFA) and Bigfoot Fundraising

Background

Deeper engagement and attracting donors don’t just happen by chance. They also don’t happen by simply testing a range of ads and going with the best-performing ones. Although, hear us out, a data-led approach is what we’re all about. 

However, it’s not the only piece in the puzzle. When working with organisations of all sizes, like Lung Foundation Australia, we implement a four-part approach that is data-led, focuses on testing and learning, uses powerful content, and integrates several touchpoints to share the message (such as their own organic social platforms and their website).

Special characteristics

By using the previous Facebook targeting insights and creating lookalike audiences, Lung Foundation Australia was able to capitalise on previous campaign results and retarget those who were best-performing segments. Helping the team to investigate integrating their messages across multiple touchpoints, we were able to tap into the power of repetition to increase awareness and recognition of the campaign, and also ensure that we were communicating in a range of ways to test which channels of communication were most effective for the supporters. We created more general ads vs case-specific ads to cater to different levels of ‘engagement’. 

By utilising the expertise and experience of an agency like Bigfoot Fundraising, the team at Lung Foundation Australia were also advised to maximise a matched giving component on social which was only promoted to ‘warm’ audiences (larger remarketing pool, primarily of people who had watched our campaign case study videos) and their warm electronic direct mail (EDM) list to maximise results over a short period of time. 

The campaign was frequently optimised to ensure the higher performing ads were running to increase ROI (return on investment). We ran a video views campaign alongside the donation ads to assist in creating LFA’s remarketing audience. 

The digital landscape has become noisier than ever. Creating content that stops the scroll and holds viewers’ attention becomes an increasingly hard challenge even for the well-seasoned marketer. We started by deep-diving into their past campaigns, their services areas etc and created a key message document - distilling the key campaign messages, LFA unique differences etc into strong compelling messages we could use on social ads. 

By implementing a strong video focus for this campaign, we were able to help them amplify stories that would connect with their viewers in a visual way and cold audiences to the heart-moving mission and values of the brand.

With any social media campaign, having engaged ads and targeting the right people is only one part of whether the campaign will be a success – we also worked with LFA to optimise their donation landing page, focusing on donor-centric language, imagery, price points and functionality to ensure we maximised the conversion rate on the page. 

With supporters also receiving EDMs, and direct mail (DM), it’s important to align all your campaign messaging so we feedback results from social into the EDMs, unweighted social spend on the hero case study to align with EDM and DM drop dates and suggested EDM optimisations such as a forward/resend to non-openers of the matched giving email.  

We also suggested organic post suggestions to amplify the campaign video and engagement on social media – ultimately supporting the paid advertising. 

Results

Overall Lung Foundation’s digital social campaign reached over 54,000 people, had over 56,000 video plays, a very healthy CTR (click-through-rate) of 5.41 per cent, with 3,211 link clicks to the donate page and 17,447 clicks overall. This amounted to 139 donations at a cost per result of AU$59.

Matched giving ran over four days and contributed to 35 per cent of total Facebook donations. 

Influence / impact

For others looking to yield similar returns for their next campaign, we can’t stress enough the importance of testing various content, messages, formats, headlines, and buttons (including dynamic Facebook ads). 

Using video content to drive awareness, engagement and build a remarketing audience is also key, alongside aligning your ads with EDM pushes and considering a matched giving component which could too be the icing on the cake for hitting your return on investment targets.