Raising Millions Through Digital Ads

When Stacey Abrams announced her campaign for the 2022 Georgia governorship, she needed fundraising to not only match but surpass her outstanding 2018 results.

This groundbreaking campaign needed a disruptive online fundraising program that could re-energize Leader Abrams’ existing base while also expanding the movement to new donors both in Georgia and nationwide.

With the saturation of donation asks on Facebook, our creative needed to be innovative enough to cut through the noise. This meant experimenting with new forms of creative and clearly defining which types of ads worked best.

Fundraising consistency was key — in addition to capitalizing on key campaign moments, we needed to build a reliable operation that could drive donations at a sustainable pace.

And we needed to overcome all the hurdles posed by Leader Abrams’ opponents, from an effort to ban her campaign from fundraising to the Republican machine’s support of incumbent Governor Kemp.

To build on Leader Abrams’ existing donor list, we modeled current supporters and built a variety of new-donor audiences on Facebook. We created search ads to get in front of our most likely donors and optimized based on precise terms searched by supporters specifically looking to donate to Leader Abrams. We also utilized list rentals and swaps to expand her base quickly—all of which resulted in 4.7 million new potential donors.

With our audience rapidly growing, we tested dozens of tactics for fundraising asks to cut through the noise and keep supporters energized, including static graphics, images, GIFs, and videos.

We jumped on rapid response moments throughout the campaign to maximize our fundraising, while continuously testing, iterating, and optimizing our evergreen tactics to provide steady and reliable funding.

Through coding and close analysis, we identified the most effective tactics for driving donations. Setting clear goals, generating urgency, and capitalizing on key, newsworthy moments helped us keep up the fundraising momentum and overcome campaign hurdles.

Anatomy of our winning ad

URGENCY
NEWSWORTHY MOMENT
DIRECT ASK
URGENCY

In total, through list acquisition and digital ads, the paid program we ran for Leader Abrams’ campaign raised over $9 million with an overall ROI of 247%, for a net total of $5.4 million raised.

We raised over $3.6 million through our digital ads program, with an overall ROI of 160%.

A diverse portfolio of media investments and creatives allowed us to grow revenue while optimizing costs: 200+ different ad variations developed and tested.

Assemble sourced 4.7 million new names for the campaign’s email list, which returned a net of over $4 million for an acquisition ROI of 386%.