To help nonprofits understand the seismic shifts in online charitable giving last year, Quantcast analyzed thousands of North American donations across key time periods to better understand shifts in donor audience profiles and behaviors during COVID-19. 

We published two insights guides, 2020 Canadian Charity Insights and US Holiday Charity Insights 2020, which provided nonprofits with an in-depth look at the evolving shifts in online consumer behavior, including donation and giving trends, and provided readers with specific recommendations for how to approach last year’s unique holiday season, one of the best times in the year to attract more donors and inspire charitable giving.  

Helping Nonprofits Achieve Their Objectives 

We’re committed to helping nonprofits raise awareness, attract new donors, and increase fundraising. Nonprofits such as the African Wildlife Foundation, The American Diabetes Association, the Environmental Defense Fund, KQED, Planned Parenthood, Salvation Army, the SickKids Foundation, and the UN Refugee Agency have leveraged our products and ad services to better understand who their donors are and what they are doing. With these audience insights, they can craft more relevant messaging and more effectively manage their ad campaigns. 

I wanted to share how one of our nonprofit customers created a successful digital advertising campaign that raised awareness, increased donations, and fueled event participation.

SickKids Foundation: Million Reasons Run campaign

SickKids Foundation is the fundraising arm of the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), one of the world’s foremost pediatric healthcare institutions and Canada’s leading center dedicated to advancing children’s health through the integration of patient care, research, and education. The goal of the foundation is to raise funds to upgrade their facilities, elevate their research, extend care to more children around the world, and enrich the compassionate care they deliver to foster the lifelong well-being of children and their families. Contributions support the discovery of life-saving treatments that improve survival rates, quality of life, and outcomes for children who are facing health issues such as cancer, epilepsy, diabetes, congenital heart defects, and life-threatening allergies.

The Million Reasons Run campaign is a virtual, nationwide running challenge from the SickKids Foundation that raises money for children’s health research, which supports the discovery of life-saving treatments, helps find cures, and fuels disease prevention at local children’s hospitals across Canada. The event is self-guided, with participants setting their own running and fundraising goals.

The Aber Group, The Million Reasons Run’s digital media agency, worked with the SickKids Foundation to create a campaign to recruit participants and encourage them to fundraise, with a focus on reaching runners, parents with children, and supporters of the 13 participating children’s hospitals. 

This campaign had the unique challenge of needing to drive awareness in its inaugural year as well as recruit virtual community participation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since most Canadians were locked down and stuck in their homes during the winter, the foundation decided to launch the running event in late spring. This turned out to be a great way to motivate Canadians to get out of the house and go for a run, while benefiting SickKids and its partner hospitals.

According to Laura Main, our managing director in Canada, “Since this was the inaugural year for the Million Reasons Run, there wasn’t any pre-existing data to pull from.” The solution was straightforward: place a pixel on the Million Reasons Run homepage and leverage run registrations to collect new data. Through Ara®, Quantcast’s AI and machine learning engine, Quantcast was able to provide insights that were used to optimize the campaign and tap into net-new participants across Canada.

Specifically, the Quantcast Platform enabled the team to leverage search-powered audiences as an upper funnel tactic to drive consideration and intent. People converting “were browsing topics that included family and parenthood, hobbies and interests and mountain biking,” Laura let me know. “Conversions increased on Wednesday and Thursday and are especially higher during the second half of the day.” 

In addition, full funnel targeting was used to reach prospects and retarget customers who had displayed interest in the organization.

The results were transformative:

  • The campaign raised overall $2.2 million in donations (129% of goal)
  • 8,000 people participated in the challenge in May
  • Over 7000+ home page site visits in the first two weeks
  • Over 600+ donation conversions 
  • Run registrations exceeded over 400

It’s clear that advertising can be used as a force for good. At Quantcast, we’re committed to helping nonprofits raise awareness and increase funding by helping them plan, measure, activate and innovate with the Quantcast Platform and our comprehensive ad campaign management service.

Learn More

To gain a more in-depth picture, download our 2020 Canadian Charity Insights, US Holiday Charity Insights 2020, and 2020 Canadian Holiday Insights. You can also read our case study about how The Aber Group ran such a successful fundraising campaign for the SickKids Foundation. If you are interested in partnering with Quantcast to harness deep insights about your audiences, please get in touch here.