Charitable organisation
Macmillan Cancer Support
UK charity uses Meta testing to help drive fundraiser growth
Macmillan Cancer Support has spent more than 100 years helping people living with cancer. Cancer can disrupt your whole life, and it can be made worse simply because of who you are and where you live. Macmillan does whatever it takes to help everyone with cancer get the best care the UK has to offer, whoever and wherever they are. Macmillan is 98% funded by donations, so fundraising is vital to supporting people living with cancer.
Challenge
Macmillan wanted to build on the success of its popular Coffee Morning fundraiser. The program invites the UK public to host coffee mornings at home, at work or in their community to raise funds. Macmillan sought to drive sign-ups for the fundraiser at a lower cost so that the programme could have an even greater impact for the people living with cancer.
Solution
After reviewing performance best practices from Meta, Macmillan and their media agency, Performics @ Zenith UK, identified an opportunity to enhance performance by diversifying the charity's campaign creative to address different audiences across Facebook and Instagram. This included a variety of creative concepts for how they talked about Coffee Morning, complementing their existing lifestyle image approach with bold text images. This diversification helped to deliver the ads to people who would find them most relevant.
Macmillan and Performics @ Zenith UK used multi-cell testing to compare the impact of their new approach against their business-as-usual (BAU) strategy. To measure brand outcomes, they ran a brand lift test – using polls and brand-awareness metrics to assess the true impact of creative diversification, isolated from other marketing efforts. They also ran a conversion lift test to determine the incremental conversions generated by the new strategy versus BAU.
Results
The brand lift and conversion lift tests showed that the diversified creative generated more incremental conversions at a lower cost per conversion. The approach also outperformed the BAU for ad recall and brand familiarity while delivering the lowest cost per lift.
50%
More incremental conversions
34.7%
Lower cost per incremental outcome
26
Percentage-point increase in ad recall
9.5
Percentage-point increase in brand familiarity
"By diversifying our creative and using Meta brand and conversion lift tests, we saw stronger engagement and a sizable jump in incremental conversions. Every additional sign-up means more people coming together to raise money for Macmillan. Meta helped us reach more people, more meaningfully, and ultimately raise more vital funds to support people living with cancer."
Hannah Mason, Senior Marketing Manager
Learnings
- Use creative diversification to unlock better results: By applying performance best practices from Meta, Macmillan identified that varying creative formats could drive stronger fundraising campaign performance.
- Validate creative choices with testing: Macmillan used lift tests to prove that creative diversification led to higher recall, more conversions and lower cost per result.
- Rotate creative to improve engagement: Macmillan found that mixing creative styles and formats kept audiences engaged and boosted overall campaign effectiveness.
- Leverage Meta testing tools to drive sign-ups efficiently: Macmillan used the Meta Brand Lift and Conversion Lift tests to identify cost-effective tactics for increasing sign-ups.
