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Unicef Aus

Using YoY learnings to optimise major seasonal activity

Christmas is an incredibly important time of year for charities, and this is no different for UNICEF Australia. The yearly Christmas Appeal campaign is a crucial period on their calendar and requires a mix of digital media channels and targeting, taking learnings and recommendations from previous years.

UNICEF Australia have several donation types including One-Off Donations, Regular Gifts (packaged as joining the Global Parent Family) and at Christmas an additional focus on Inspired Gifts that can be purchased on behalf of others during the Christmas giving period. Each have slightly different and nuanced target audiences, meaning targeting and messaging needed to be tailored to each. Alongside, Search and Social, Programmatic Display and Video aimed to drive both awareness and purchase/donation completions of the various products.

What we did

Having run Christmas Appeal campaign activity in previous years, we had multiple key learnings to draw upon to build the most comprehensive full funnel programmatic strategy. Budget was split across brand building YouTube and Programmatic Prospecting Display tactics, and more donation-driven Display retargeting tactics using AI driven technologies across our self-serve DSPs.

What we did

We previously found focusing on core, population-dense Australian cities was ideal for prospecting activity, whilst retargeting would run nationally. Incorporating broad audiences worked in our favour during last year’s activity, so supplementing that with some of the better performing affinity and category targeting ensured wide-reach and good performance.

What we did

Back-weighting budget to the week prior to Christmas also meant capturing more of our audience in a donating and gift-giving mindset. We also recommended utilising creative featuring vaccine messaging, given the prevailing Covid situation in Australia.

Overall, donation revenue driven by digital channels increased by 39% year on year, a significant contribution in a successful end of year campaign for UNICEF Australia.

Top of funnel activity on YouTube achieved its goal to deliver views, traffic, and engagement, with low CPCVs, high VTRs and an overall CTR 3.4x higher than target.

Display Prospecting saw us deliver over 7M impressions to our target audience, driving users to site to engage. From here, our retargeting tactics converted this awareness and consideration, beating Christmas Appeal One Off Donation CPA target by 17%, which is the key donation metric UNICEF aim to see maximum efficiency with their Christmas Appeal.

  • 38%

    Increase in donation revenue YoY

  • 3.4x

    higher CTR than target

Our work

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