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2 Step Donor acquisition campaign for Destiny Rescue
In late 2020, Destiny Rescue approached Mindwize with an ambitious objective: To substantially and sustainably increase its monthly donor acquisition in order to fund more programs to end child exploitation.
While Destiny Rescue was already active on digital channels, its acquisition results were not nearly sufficient to reach its vision and ambition. They needed a new approach.
On meeting and hearing more about Destiny Rescue’s cause, culture and ambition, Mindwize saw an opportunity and made a strategic recommendation.
2 Step Donor acquisition
2 step campaigning is an acquisition model involving:
- Step 1: Online lead generation through a cause-based, non-financial action like a value exchange, hand-raiser, petitions, pledge, survey etc.
- Step 2: Donor conversion through a multi-channel journey of engagement, relationship-building and fundraising asks.
The 2 step model has helped many organisations increase and diversify their donor acquisition programs. When developed properly, it’s a flexible framework with solutions for organisations across all non-profit sectors. But to be successful, it needs to match an organisation’s internal culture, ambitions and cause.
In the case of Destiny Rescue, we saw a positive, “can do” team with an appetite to try new approaches to achieve more impact, and a cause – child exploitation and welfare – with very broad relevance and appeal. So the recommendation was clear for our experienced strategists.
Campaign Development – the Lean Startup Way
At Mindwize, we use a smart campaign development process that aims to maximize return on investment (ROI) while minimizing risk. Rather than putting all your investment in one campaign idea – the “all eggs in one basket” approach – we:
- Hold an ideation session with a broad team to brainstorm many campaign ideas
- Choose a number of the strongest ideas after the session
- Run a multivariate test campaign to segments of the same audiences in the same market conditions to gauge which campaign proposition resonates best with the audience
We’re then in a position to make a data-driven decision on what to roll out for longer.
The ideation session with the Destiny Rescue team was inspiring, with staff from different functions contributing over 50 ideas. The team then voted to consolidate down to a top three.
The test campaign then revealed a significant winner: The “Not OK” campaign.
This test campaign won the test both in terms of lead generation metrics (step 1) and phone conversion metrics (step 2). This put us in a position to make a confident recommendation about what to roll out for the long-term to help Destiny Rescue maximise its ROI.
The Results
When we roll out a 2 step campaign, our objective is to optimise ROI and cost per donor by rolling out for as long as feasible, which allows us to amortize campaign setup costs across more donors. Maintaining ROI and cost per donor is a factor of maintaining our achievement of targets for key metrics like cost per lead and phone conversion rate.
Thanks to the efforts of Mindwize and a great Australian phone agency we worked with, we’ve been able to roll out the Destiny Rescue “Not OK” campaign for over 12 months since September 2021, with some breaks on top of this to counter campaign fatigue.
We’ve recruited approximately 489 monthly donors and 102 one-time donors with a donor conversion journey employing a combination of email, phone conversion, retargeted advertising and of course a direct call to action off the back of the Meta lead forms.
“We’ve been thrilled with the results of this 2 step campaign. We needed to grow our regular donor base to fund the growing need we can see out there for our operations. This was the first time Destiny Rescue had tried an approach like this, and we found the guidance and support from Mindwize – along with their willingness to work collaboratively with our phone agency – to be fantastic. We’re recruiting monthly donors at a break-even of 13 months and are increasing our online community and impact. With results like that, we’ll be looking to expand this program in the future.”
Geoff Harrison, Executive Marketing Manager at Destiny Rescue
Ingredients for Success
So what makes a campaign like this successful? There are many factors. Here are our top five:
1. Great creative and creative process
Without great creative, your campaign won’t capture the attention and engagement we need for successful direct response. While we work with the best creative directors, copywriters and designers at Mindwize, we also tap the creative genius of a broad team of both our and our client’s people, and guide our brainstorming session to ensure it covers a range of lead gen types and creative possibilities.
2. Data-driven validation and decision-making
Although child exploitation is a topic that’s universally shocking, different creative approaches will engage our audience more or less; a truth reflected in the fact that one of the test campaigns performed better than the other two. Including a lower-investment test campaign to collect data on audience engagement allows us to test hypotheses and gather data on which to base higher-investment decisions, rather than working on opinion alone.
3. Great communication and coordination between teams
2 step campaigns involve 3 very important parties:
- the client, who needs to review and approve creative and maintain oversight over all aspects
- The digital agency, who leads the creative process that builds the community to convert, and also builds the online supporter and conversion journeys
- The phone agency, who should bring in the bulk of the donor conversion.
Frequent and open communication, reporting and sharing between these three parties is VITAL for the success of the campaign. Data processes and templates also need to be clearly established and adhered to for donor conversion to be optimised.
4. Continuous testing and optimisation
As aforementioned, this campaign has rolled out for over a year of continuous advertising (with some pauses between on top of this). That’s a lot of time to maintain lead acquisition targets while avoiding creative fatigue an increase in cost per lead above an acceptable thresholds. How do you do this? Endless testing of new creative and targeting approaches, campaign optimisation, and coming up with new ways to “work the angles”.
5. The right data and mindset for whole-campaign optimisation and long-term success
To maximise long-term success, the non-profit organisation needs the right mindset about investment and return. Namely: If whole-of-campaign expenses and revenue are sitting on the right ratio (according to targets), we should maximise outcomes by spending what we can while we can maintain these results.
In order to make good decisions in this way, we need the right data and reporting. This means timely and accurate reports from both digital and phone agencies – and from the client if that’s where online donations are being collected – that is then combined and turned into real-time insights on which good decisions can be made. Mindwize’s long experience with these campaigns allows us to provide both combined reports and dashboards as well as the interpretation and insights that help inform these decisions and get the best outcomes for our clients.
Want to talk donor acquisition for your organisation? Get in touch!
We’d love to hear about your organisation, needs and ambitions to grow your revenue, supporter base and community. Please reach out to balazs.horvath@mindwize.nl to schedule an obligation-free call.
About Destiny Rescue
Destiny Rescue focus on rescuing children from sexual exploitation and human trafficking. They help these children escape and stay free.
They have agents who often go undercover in brothels, bars and on the streets to find children being sexually exploited. They also identify child-sex-trafficking victims and gather the evidence needed to build a legal case against their traffickers. Then teams work alongside law enforcement to free victims and arrest offenders. They also work on online sexual exploitation of children.
They operate rescue, reintegration and prevention programs in multiple countries, and raise funds and awareness in the US, Australia and New Zealand.
About Destiny Rescue and Mindwize
Mindwize have been working with Destiny Rescue since early 2021. Our journey started with our big brainstorm where great minds from all across Destiny Rescue came together to work on the concepts, not just the fundraising team.
This is how you effectively deploy lead generation
Learn from three real-life examples
Today, you watch a video on Facebook about animal suffering. Tomorrow, you’ll see an ad for an animal rights charity to sign a petition, download a brochure or take a quiz – something the organization can use to get your contact details. In this way, you have become a lead. The charity can contact you with a request, an offer or a service.
In this whitepaper, we will highlight a few real-life examples of online lead generation for you.
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