A quick guide to online advertising for charities

Social media advertising

A staggering fifth or more of the world’s population is subscribed to Facebook, and research suggests that Facebook use has increased more than 50% in countries hardest hit by coronavirus over the past month.

Advertising on Facebook can help charities drive traffic to their website or grab the attention of potential new supporters. The major benefit is that organisations can create very specific audiences and target age groups, demographics and more based on Facebook’s user data, so you can reach only the people most likely to engage with your cause.

Similarly to PPC advertising, you only pay when someone clicks on your site or profile. However, there’s no minimum budget to start experimenting, giving charities the chance to test out their campaigns before putting more money towards them. Organisations advertising on Facebook can play with different advertisement formats like videos, canvas ads, images or carousels that relay a range of images.

Charity agency Platypus Digital showcases some great examples of charity Facebook ad campaigns that have stood out.

Retargeting

Also referred to as ’remarketing’, this type of advertisement works by keeping your brand in front of people who have visited your site but not yet donated or taken any action. Alternatively, they can be targeted at people already in your contact list.

These people are a prime opportunity for reaching out to because they’re already shown direct interest in your organisation. Instead of being on just one platform, the ads follow them while surfing the web or on social media. This might sound a bit invasive, but actually, the more personal and relevant you can make your marketing, the more successful it’s likely to be - as we explained in our webinar at the beginning of the year looking at why the personalisation trend is dominating the web in 2020.

These ads are timely in that they can be retargeted pretty much as soon as someone leaves your site, and can steer someone towards a specific page, such as your donation page.

The downside is that you need to start with a fairly big audience, and that these types of adverts can’t be paid for using Google Ad Grants. It can be an effective strategy if you already have a large number of people visiting your site who you want to encourage towards your donation page and you want to make the absolute most of that audience.

There are quite a few options for platforms out there which will help you plan and deliver your retargeting campaigns, like ReTargeter, AdRoll and Perfect Audience.