Mind | Raising millions with virtual challenge event fundraising

Develop a virtual fundraising event concept for Mind, and activate it via paid social to drive fundraising income.

Traditional challenge event fundraising was growing stale. Charities were hamstrung by a few key platforms which took a decent cut and provided a clunky user experience. This led to less money raised per fundraiser and a lack of data passed onto the charity. Facebook fundraising tools presented a great alternative. However, any organisation willing to give it a try had to simplify their usual approach and adopt best practice journeys to make it work. The model also required that media be managed extremely efficiently - a high CPL would mean ROI simply wouldn’t stack up.

I worked alongside Givepanel to implement their fundraising model for Mind. The first step was clarifying objectives and understanding the challenge event audience. I utilised analytics reports, Facebook’s own insights dashboard, prior challenge event campaign reports, and tools such as YouGov and google trends to land on a broad and predominantly female audience. I then developed the event concept. Understanding that simple is best, and that we needed to strike the right balance between achievable and challenging, I landed on “100 miles in May for Mind”. A campaign and media plan with set KPIs and modelled targets then followed. Keeping to Givepanel best practice, I built out a Lead Gen campaign across Facebook and Instagram. I employed a broad cold audience, lookalikes, warm audience, and retargeting ad-sets - opting for campaign budget optimisation to maximise efficiency. Budget was weighted towards the first two weeks of the campaign to avoid busy dates and keep CPM down. I utilised Dynamic Creative Optimisation to allow Facebook to determine which combination of copy, design, and headline asset would drive the highest CTR and lowest CPL. I also worked with Open’s creative team to develop a mix of video and static assets. We updated creative regularly to optimise towards best performers, or align with news and drive urgency with countdown messaging. I led regular stakeholder meetings for Open with the event team at Mind, and the community managers who drove engagement in the Facebook group. I managed all media and optimisation, and utilised supermetrics to feed a custom Tableau dashboard for reporting.

Over £1 million raised

Over 7,000 fundraisers aquired

ROI smashed targets