The Background
Following small wins from a number of small burst digital acquisition campaigns at Christmas and Tax time, the team at Very Special Kids decided to transition to a rolling campaign approach in order to capitalise on their initial campaign learnings and scale their digital cash donor pipeline.
The Campaign
Working with fed in a full-service capacity ~ from strategic planning, creative development, campaign and landing page set-up, to ongoing management of their ads budget ~ this campaign built on insights derived from Very Special Kids’ prior campaign learnings (at Christmas and Tax times), to create a reliable and steady acquisition pathway.
The key objectives:
- deliver new cash supporters at under $150 per record; and
- deliver a significant volume of cash donors to strengthen their cash appeals program.
This campaign represented a considered boost to advertising investment for Very Special Kids, so great attention was placed on the selection of the case studies to be featured, with the creative focusing strongly on video content created by the wonderful families being supported by Very Special Kids services.
The best performing video ads featured highly emotive and personal stories, so all raw footage captured was very respectfully edited to maintain authenticity and develop creative which felt real and emotional – this meant choosing unedited photos instead of heavily designed, and also using authentic, hand-held, home video style phone footage instead of studio style, heavily directed production style footage.
The strength of this campaign was born in the consistent story weaved throughout each piece of creative. Video was established as a high performing format for Very Special Kids, with multi-length versions of videos deployed.
Ad creative was also strategically adapted to seasonal messaging to optimise on donor sentiment and create a sense of urgency at critical program points such as Christmas and back-to-school times.
Creative Examples
The Results
The 2024-25 digital cash acquisition campaign performed exceedingly well. By responsively refining creative and audiences throughout the campaign, Very Special Kids found their winning formula and achieved a high volume of new digital donors (over 2,400) for a low cost throughout this campaign (CPA $42, ROAS 1.10), effectively doubling their starting pool of active cash donors.
Case study selection and buy-in from the Very Special Kids families featured was essential to this campaign’s success, with the authentic approach taken to the video content shared being directly contributable to the campaign’s strong results. As such, this campaign was not overly reliant on a single ad set, but a combination, contributing to its overall performance.
This campaign also saw great success generating a decent pool of new mid value donors, all with potential for even greater gift propensity once a repeat relationship is established.
