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At the start of 2022, Facebook made some changes to their detailed interest targeting. This affected the fundraising space as some of those detailed targeting interests were cause and charity related, noted by Meta as ‘sensitive’ topics.
You may have found yourself asking “what now?”
What’s important to remember is that the topics have been removed, not the people you’re targeting. So we just need to readjust and navigate the new limitation. Here are four things you can do as you’re figuring out how these changes are going to affect your digital fundraising strategy.
Go broad
See how you go with removing all detailed targeting parameters. It may still be appropriate for you to set a specific age bracket, or location. But beyond the basic demographics, go broad.
Utilise lookalike audiences
Whether it’s your current charity followers, those who have engaged with your content previously, or last year’s fundraisers. You can choose how close of a lookalike it will be from 1-10% (1% is the closest to your sample audience). We’ve found lookalikes to be a great addition to our Facebook Ad mix. To learn more about lookalike audiences on Facebook Ads, check out Facebook Advertising for Non-profits - Part 1.
Use your data
With the consent from your non-profit organisation database, you can upload this data to Facebook and specifically target them with your advertising. In addition to that you can create lookalike audiences to expand the audience coming from your database.
Explore what’s left
ALL detailed targeting interests haven’t been removed, only some. One that’s still there for example, is ‘charitable causes’ as an interest. Test interests which remain, and consider combining them if you’d like to be more specific (example - must match ‘charitable causes’ AND ‘marathon running’). Think about how your organisation can relate to many non-sensitive topics and test with those. It’s time to think outside the non-profit box for this one.
As always with Facebook Ads, it’s about testing and refining, taking learnings into account, and then testing some more. If you’re running a short fundraising campaign where time is limited, it can be much more difficult to gather learnings with enough time to make any changes. Need help with your non-profit Facebook Ads? Reach out and see what we can take off your hands!