Monday, April 06, 2020

COVID -19 Breaks our Website ...


I would for UNICEF USA, a domestic and fundraising and advocacy organization for UNICEF. This past week, I worked with our Marketing and Communications team to asses our fundraising results for the past quarter and outcomes bleak, but there were a few unexpected learnings. Expectedly, we were below our fundraising targets plan due to competition from political candidates, impeachment coverage, and lack of emergencies. The cost of media doubled across Facebook and Google - our two major fundraising platforms. However, we saw increases in both average donation amount +30% and conversion rate to donate +10% during that time.

We learned that COVID19 has changed the dynamics of the market in a profound way.  Our messaging in cross-channel approach are seeing positive yet early returns with our owned and lapsed audience.
Our Corona-related email sends we’ve we were able to add over 150 new monthly donors (the most ever from any emergency or campaign) who, based on existing monthly donor benchmarks, are projected to be worth about $35,000 over the next 12 months.

Our Corona-related email sends have reactivated nearly 50,000 supporters (the most ever from any emergency or campaign), which positions us very well for end of year fundraising. In an effort to mitigate revenue impact, we are using our existing budget to drive greatest return on investment, we've stopped low retaining channels like Face-to-Face and Door-to-Door, and we are determining areas where we can both double down to secure fundraising or save and cut back spend.

What’s happening here? More people are at home and online. The traffic to our website has been unprecedented and it led to a backend crash that kept our IT team up most nights last week. Perhaps some of these changes in donor behavior could have been predicted, but could we have reacted fast enough? All continues to evolve in this not yet new normal.

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