Movember Foundation

Blue State partnered with the Movember Foundation to accelerate and run their global digital fundraising programme, ultimately driving fundraiser signups and raising money. As fundraisers and donors had historically been acquired via email marketing and referrals, at Blue State, we were excited to explore acquisition through a blend of social and programmatic advertising.

Targeting a specific demographic

To understand who we should focus on reaching, we conducted a deep analysis of Movember’s donors and signups from the past four years, looking at fundraising averages by gender, product and market. We then broke out audiences even more granularly to understand the differences between our high-value, low-value and inactive audiences. 

This enabled us to understand the value of signups after the point of acquisition. We didn’t just want to secure cheap conversions — we wanted to understand how valuable those conversions would be in the long run and weigh our investment accordingly. Because of this, we were willing to run media at a higher cost in order to acquire high-value fundraisers who will stay with the organisation for years to come.

Testing and optimising, constantly

Rather than “launch and leave” our campaign, we optimised it throughout, making creative and strategic decisions based on real-time data. In total, we launched over 6,000 different ads across our signup and donate campaigns, helping us stretch our client’s budget as far as possible to deliver the best possible results. It was this optimisation that helped us increase the number of signups by 54% YoY, and donations by 63% YoY, while making efficiencies on the previous year’s total budget.

Making technology work harder

Thanks in part to our focus on retargeting, we beat our highest acquisition target by 33%. Not only do these additional fundraisers reflect additional revenue for Movember programmes, they also represent a revitalised fundraiser pool that can keep the momentum going and help raise awareness for future campaigns. And thanks to our landing page optimisations, Movember forecasts that they’ll raise millions more in subsequent campaigns.