Driving donations through digital channels for Leeds Hospital Charity

The brief

Leeds Hospital Charity works with local communities, businesses, and schools to provide £5million in funding support for Leeds Teaching Hospitals each year.

We started a charity partnership with Leeds Hospital Charity in 2019 which involves fundraising through a series of staff events, as well as providing pro-bono digital marketing support to increase traffic to the charity’s Appeal Page, as this is where supporters can donate to their monthly appeals.

One of the campaigns we supported was the Leeds Hospital Charity 2020 September appeal.

Targeting

Only targeting non-customers is essential to making the most out of Leeds Hospital Charity’s media spend. Before running the campaign, we uploaded their offline customer match data to ensure that all existing customers were excluded from targeting, as this is an inefficient use of budget. We also used the customer data to identify which Leeds postcodes are most likely to donate, which was used to inform our bidding strategy. PPC activity focused on targeting users for relevant brand and generic keywords who also had a Leeds (LS) postcode.

Paid social was carried out across Facebook and Twitter. We used a mix of prospecting (targeting new users in Leeds who met the audience criteria) and retargeting (targeting users who had visited the site but hadn’t donated) activity. We used display to retarget users who had been to the Leeds Hospitals Charity donation landing page and appeals page but had left without donating.

Messaging

From our previous campaigns, we knew that strong emotive imagery and messaging referencing how the charity helps to support the NHS performs well, so we led with this when creating ad campaigns. Once we had started running ads for this appeal, we adjusted bidding to target higher-performing creatives more aggressively. This allowed us to use the budget more efficiently and drive better results.