Enhance nonprofit advertising performance this giving season

Updated June 25, 2024: Charitable giving tools vary by country. To see what is available for you, visit our Tools and Solutions page.

As giving season approaches, nonprofits have a unique opportunity to connect with supporters and drive meaningful impact. For nonprofit marketers, understanding how to get the most out of Meta advertising tools is crucial. This blog will introduce you to Opportunity Score and the seven core performance principles—so you can make every ad dollar count this giving season.

What is Opportunity Score?

Opportunity Score is a tool in Meta Ads Manager that provides personalized, experimentally proven recommendations to help you optimize your campaigns. It gives you a score (0–100) reflecting how well your campaigns align with best practices at Meta and offers prioritized recommendations to improve performance. While a high score doesn’t guarantee results, applying these recommendations has been shown to drive better outcomes for advertisers.

Key benefits include:

• Personalized, prioritized, and proven recommendations
• Near real-time updates as you adopt best practices
• Helps you focus on high-impact actions before, during and after campaign launch

Learn more about Opportunity Score.

Advertisers who adopted Opportunity Score recommendations saw a 12%¹ median decrease in cost per result compared to business-as-usual campaigns.

The 7 Performance Principles

We have expanded our performance best practices. These expanded best practice categories are designed to give you more specific recommendations that are tailored to your performance needs. With more tailored recommendations you can implement the solutions that suit your organization to further fuel performance.

1. Automated Campaigns: End-to-end automation is the most efficient way to reach your audiences and achieve your campaign goals by applying AI to get the most performance for your organization. End-to-end automation includes Advantage+ Sales, Advantage+ App and Advantage+ Leads.

Advertisers using Advantage+ sales campaigns saw a 9% ²
improvement in cost per conversion on average.

2. Objectives and Goals: Drive the outcomes you want by ensuring your campaigns are well-aligned with your goals and that they’re reaching them efficiently and effectively. The new Meta value optimization solutions allow advertisers to maximize outcomes beyond simple conversion volume or CPA, offering tailored options for purchases, non-purchase events, and profit, each best suited to different organizational goals and campaign types. Additionally, the new incremental attribution setting enables advertisers to focus on driving conversions that would not have otherwise occurred, with recent tests showing up to a 46% performance lift when optimizing for incrementality, and expanded availability of these features rolling out throughout the year.

Advantage+ sales campaigns with value optimization delivered 37% ³
higher incremental ROAS compared to conversion optimization.

3. Audience: Combine your audience knowledge with AI to reach all current audiences and as well discover new ones. Advantage+ audience takes your usual audience selections, such as a list of donors/community members and then goes beyond them. By using Advantage+ audience, you allow us to look outside your set audience parameters to find the people most interested in your organization.

Advantage+ Audience users saw a 13%
⁴
lower median cost per product catalog sale and 7% lower median cost per website conversion.

4. Creative and Placements: Diversify your creative assets and placements to deliver the right message to the right audience, leveraging AI for optimization. Use six or more placements and a variety of creative formats to increase reach and relevance. Learn more about creative diversification.

Campaigns with 6+ placements saw a 5% ⁵ lower cost per optimized conversion.

5. Signals: Improve and strengthen your data quality with tools like the Conversions API for better measurement and optimization. The Conversions API, one of the Meta Business Tools, creates a direct connection between your marketing data and Meta technologies. This helps you to use your own marketing data to optimize ad reach, decrease cost per result and see a more complete picture of campaign outcomes while respecting people’s privacy.

A 20% ⁶ increase in conversions through the Conversions API corresponded to a 16% decrease in cost per conversion.

6. Budget and Bidding: Allocate budget dynamically to top-performing assets using AI-driven tools like Advantage+ campaign budget. Advantage+ campaign budget automatically manages your budget across ad sets to give you the best results.

Set one central campaign budget that continuously distributes in real time to ad sets with the best opportunities, enabled by AI.

Advantage+ campaign budget led to a 5%⁷ lower CPA on average for advertisers with Autobid campaigns.

7. Validate Results: Measure what truly drives results using A/B testing and Conversion Lift studies to inform future strategies. A/B Testing at Meta enables advertisers to compare different versions of ads by randomly splitting audiences, helping identify which creative, audience, or strategy drives the best performance. In contrast, Conversion Lift uses test and control groups to measure the true incremental impact of ads by quantifying conversions that occurred specifically because of the advertising, providing a deeper understanding of causal effectiveness beyond simple comparisons.

Advertisers using Conversion Lift saw a 20%⁸ median increase in paid search traffic from exposure to Meta ads.

By embracing Opportunity Score and these seven performance principles, nonprofits can maximize their advertising impact during giving season. Start by reviewing your Opportunity Score, apply the recommended best practices, and use data-driven insights to continuously improve. With these strategies, you’ll be well-positioned to reach more supporters and drive greater results for your cause.