Facebook are introducing On-Facebook Donation Ads. This is absolutely massive news. As you already know – Facebook’s donate tools are highly effective and are activating completely new donors and fundraisers; and their ad platform is exceptionally powerful once you know how to optimise ad campaigns properly.
The lack of integration between these two things has long been a massive frustration: we couldn’t optimise ads for donations that happened on Facebook, and had to use all kinds of workarounds to promote and track Facebook donations. But now that’s changing. Facebook say:
Nonprofit organizations who are onboarded to the Facebook Fundraising tools now have the option to bring their donation advertising campaigns onto the Facebook platform with On-Facebook Donation Ads. This new signal-resilient product enables your organization to benefit from Facebook’s personalized advertising solutions with two new Custom Audiences: previous donors and previous fundraiser creators.
On-Facebook Donation Ads will enable you to measure conversions, your return on ad spend (ROAS) on Facebook within Ads Manager and understand which ad tactics, such as creative or audience, work best.
Your donors will also have the opportunity to share their contact information with you in a privacy-safe way if they choose, so that you can reach them via your CRM in the future.
GivePanel have a blog post with more details on this exciting announcement, and Nick Burne has summarised why it’s so significant:
- Because your donors won’t have to leave Facebook it means your conversion rates will go up radically (in my guestimation maybe by 2 or 3 times). This means if your cost to acquire a donor before was $100 it might come down to $50 or $30.
- It means you can optimise for donations without pixels and iOS 14 issues. Not only will your ad budget get more donations but these donations will help your ads “dial in” to the right audience, further improving your results.
- “But we don’t get the data” is a constant cry we hear. Aha! Now you’ll be able re-target donors with Facebook ads, communicating with them with all sorts of content, stories, calls to action etc.
GivePanel are holding a free webinar about these new Facebook developments this Thursday, 30th September, at 3pm GMT.
More upcoming changes from Facebook
There’s a second, also significant update from Facebook: TechCrunch is reporting that they will be overhauling many of their Business Tools, in response to ads being affected by Apple’s iOS changes. There’s lots: more integrated chat ads across Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, the introduction of remarketing emails, and split testing of organic posts.
Something that will strike joy into the heart of anyone who has ever had to untangle a load of badly set up Facebook accounts and profiles:
“Facebook will also begin testing something called “Work Accounts,” which will allow business owners to access their business products, like Business Manager, separately from their personal Facebook account. They’ll be able to manage these accounts on behalf of employees and use single sign-on integrations.”
Now, of course, any new admin tools from Facebook are still likely to cause mass confusion, but still – if this stops people setting up doomed, terms-and-conditions-violating, second profiles for ‘work’, then it will be a positive thing.
Work accounts won’t be available for a while – Facebook says that they’re testing them with a small number of businesses now and don’t plan to make them widely available until 2022. You can check that your Facebook and other business accounts are set up correctly with Digital Charity Lab’s digital account management toolkit – free to download.
Icons by Freepik from Flaticon.com
Hi, Any idea what ROI is for On-Facebook Donation Ads?
Very difficult to benchmark I’m afraid, as campaigns are so different depending on the cause, the ask, the campaign budget and the donation mechanism (ie, are the ads sending people to a website to donate, or are they donating on Facebook). Only thing to do is to start testing and see what you get.