29 May, 2020

How empower helped Tap Twinning’s Coronavirus fundraising appeal raise £500,000

Client
Toilet Twinning

Sector
International NGOs

What we did
Paid Media
Email Marketing

“When we started to see the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic and how it was going to affect the countries where we work, we needed to launch a fundraising appeal ASAP. And so together with Empower, we created a product and a campaign and launched within just 24 hours. It was quite incredible. And that was due to Empower’s agility and flexibility and also their knowledge and expertise of us as an organisation and of what we wanted to achieve. And then over the next month, they monitored and maximised the campaign and it raised a quite staggering half a million pounds, and I know we could never have done that without Empower.”

– Lorraine Kingsley, CEO, Toilet Twinning

The Client

Toilet Twinning is an initiative which invites people to “twin” their own toilet with latrines in poor communities. This is a way of raising funds to enable people in the poorest nations to have clean water and a proper toilet.

2 billion people don’t have somewhere safe to go to the toilet. 780 million people don’t have access to clean water. That’s why Toilet Twinning’s approach of “toilet, taps and training” is a lifesaving trio.

Toilet Twinning was founded in 2010 and since 2015 has been running as a fundraising wing of Tearfund.

The Challenge

With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic,  Toilet Twinning needed to create and launch a new fundraising product that could capture people’s imagination and help fund a massive step up in their hygiene and handwashing training worldwide in response to the coronavirus. Asking people to twin their toilet didn’t seem to make sense with what they were asking people to support; they needed a more immediate product that had a direct link with the covid-19 related work overseas.

Tap Twinning matches the Toilet Twinning concept, but instead of twinning their toilet, people are asked to “twin” a water tap. For every donation made in the UK, hygiene education and handwashing stations would then be funded in a community in a developing country.

The Approach

Toilet Twinning had previously asked Empower to plan, set up and execute all Facebook advertising campaigns in 2019 with the aim of getting more toilets twinned and boosting revenue for the charity.

The value of a tap twin is at the higher end of a donation ask for users, which can result in a significant drop off rate. The challenge for Empower was to attract relevant users with targeting and a clear call to action.

Building on learnings from 12 months of activity, the Empower team created the messaging, assets, landing page, launch email and paid media strategy for the campaign – and we did it within 24 hours of getting the brief.

The Results

The Tap Twinning campaign raised over £500,000 within the first few weeks of launch.

The Facebook Ads campaign contributed significantly to that total:

  • Facebook Conversions: 2,215
  • Cost Per Conversion: £19.65
  • Facebook Ads Conversion Value: £170,382 (34% of total raised)
  • Facebook ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): 3.91

But the Tap Twinning campaign wasn’t just a one off…

During Christmas 2019, Empower set up a Facebook advertising campaign to target relevant users with a donation ask to give a Toilet Twin as a Christmas present.

  • This campaign generated 834 donations, bringing in a phenomenal revenue of £67,917 for Toilet Twinning.
  • As a result of the Facebook advertising campaign, 5,200 toilets twinned in December 2019 compared to 3,200 twinned in December 2018 – that’s a 62% increase from the previous year.
  • The campaign resulted in a 27% increase in December 2019 income compared to December 2018.

And in the run up to Father’s Day, Empower created a Facebook campaign to encourage users to twin their Dad’s toilet. And the results were fantastic, achieving 363 toilets twinned, bringing the charity a revenue of £24,512 and 12.2 ROI.

In 2019, our work on Toilet Twinning’s Facebook advertising resulted in a record breaking year for the charity, helping them achieve their highest annual income!

And with Tap Twinning proving to be a successful product for Toilet Twinning, the Empower brief has been expanded to continue building on the high ROIs generated so far.

Hire empower for your next campaign

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