facebook ads

As I prepare for the 4th iteration as a faculty member of the Academic Impressions "Doing More with Less Strategic Planning for Annual Giving," I am struggling with social networking. I realize that this hardly makes me unique in fundraising and aim to do something about that. I have previously talked about using social networking to drive support through event based efforts and still think that is a very strong strategy but isn't one that we can all take advantage of.

At the conference next week I plan to talk about utilizing ads on facebook as one possible strategy so I thought I would run through that here today as well. This is intentionally the elevator version and I hope that Stephanie will chime in with how we can more effectively design and create that ad to utilize the space and opportunity that exists here.

Facebook ads are really very simple - you get the opportunity to place a specific, designed focussed message in front of a targeted audience that you select when you create the ad. Only those folks who meet the criteria you have created have the message displayed and you can choose from a series of options regarding what you pay for and how much. For fundraising purposes, I recommend paying for clicks and make sure that the message is clear and the case solid - that will drive down the number of clicks but drive up the conversion dollars (dollars raised per click.) As you have the ability to target this, don't try to be everything to everybody in one appeal - you pay per action your constituents take not per segment so make the segments meaningful.

My recommendation is to spend some time looking through the facebook ads that appear when you utilize your account (you do have one right?) and identify where your organization needs to be in terms of design and style. Once you have that, consider what other options you have (ie age, gender, campus...) and design a couple of ads to test that. Create a general one for everyone else and see which costs the most, which raises the most and what makes sense for you. This is a terrific place to play with messaging and testing of look and appeal as you have some great metrics and can see what folks do, not just what they say.

Learn more at: http://www.facebook.com/advertising/