December 2022: How to adjust your campaign while it’s running

Happy year-end campaign season! I hope yours is off to a great start. 

I just saw this wonderful news: My We Are For Good podcast episode, How to Rock Your Year-End Giving Campaign, is one of the pod’s top 10 most downloaded episodes of all time. What an honor! 

After months of planning, most year-end campaigns are now up and running. While some are seeing instant money-making success from emails, digital ads and other channels, others may not be seeing many gifts (yet). 

If you’ve worked with me before, you know that:

• I design digital campaigns with testing built in, to spread my clients’ budgets across a variety of channels and creative iterations. 

• I treat digital campaigns as living, breathing things that require attention and care while they’re running.

Assuming your year-end campaign is already running or nearly ready to rock, let’s focus on that second point.  

Digital campaigns are living, breathing things that require attention and care while they’re running.

I’ll call out a few prominent digital channels to illustrate this point. 

Digital ads:

If you’re currently running social media, search, and/or display ads for fundraising and they’re not yielding any or many gifts…

Don’t panic, because most donations will come in the final days of the year, and most people need to see your ad(s) multiple times before giving. 

That said, you should be continuously investigating during your campaign. For starters, are people clicking on your ads? If your click-through rate is at or below the benchmarks for the platform(s) you're using, what adjustments can you make to the copy or creative? 

It’s important to only make changes to your ads once a week—or once every few days at most. Decide on the changes you’d like to test, then make them all at once and give your campaign a few days before deciding how the changes performed. If you make edits too frequently, digital advertising platforms get stuck in "learning mode" and won’t have time to optimize on your behalf.  

Emails:

Email appeals not converting like you’d hoped? Are people opening the emails but not clicking through, or are they clicking through but not donating? The former could be an email problem, the latter could be a website problem. 

If people aren’t clicking the call to action buttons or links in your emails, brainstorm some adjustments to test. Can you make your call to action more visually prominent? Can you split your email list into two groups and test a different message or email length with each group? Split testing will provide insights to inform the next email, and the next. 

Website: 

As your campaign progresses, if you're still struggling with low-performing ads or emails closer to the end of the month, it could be a user experience problem. 

Is your year-end landing page simple and emotive? Is it super easy to donate, with multiple payment methods to choose from? If lots of people are hitting this webpage and promptly bouncing, your web page isn’t carrying donors across the finish line. Make donations on both mobile and desktop to rule out any technical issues!

Time for more brainstorming. Can you test a different background image? A different headline? Simplify that donation form? Make changes one at a time, then give it a few days before assessing the results. 

Campaign management is an art and a science.

It’s an art brainstorming what might make your campaign more compelling, and it’s a science reviewing the data within each platform to prove or disprove your hypotheses. I recommend tracking your campaign adjustments in a spreadsheet so you can line up the timing of your changes with any spikes or drops in donations. Your change log will also be a valuable resource when you’re planning next year’s campaign and can't remember the details from this year! 

To sum it all up:

• Stay curious about your campaign while it’s running; brainstorm adjustments you can make that might improve results.

• Make one round of changes per week so you can collect enough data for clear results.

• Look to last week's data to inform your next move.

And remember: Year-end campaigns are unique because most gifts are made in the final days of the year, even when you advertise and communicate consistently for months. The ads, emails, texts, and other digital pushes you're running now are priming people for those final days! 

So in the words of my nephew Noah (delivered in an adorable Irish accent), “Don’t freak out, man.” 

Don’t freak out, and don’t give up. Stay curious, test thoughtfully, and keep track of any changes you make. 

Cheering you on, and wishing you a joyful holiday season.

-Caroline