How Platypus helped Concern Worldwide launch an emergency Ukraine appeal

The challenge

Normally you plan charity campaigns well in advance. You align diaries with your colleagues, you take any upcoming awareness days or other activity into account, you agree dates for your big campaign.

But if you’re a certain kind of charity, you get no notice that your campaign is launching.

This is the case for charities running emergency appeals to respond to disasters. Charities like Concern Worldwide UK, who asked us to set up an emergency donation appeal via Meta Ads after the escalation of conflict in Ukraine.

We have a long standing relationship with the team at Concern. So they trusted us to run this emergency appeal for them quickly, setting everything up to raise the most money possible.

What we did

The conflict escalated on 24 February 2022. Concern briefed the appeal to Platypus shortly afterwards, and we launched the campaign very quickly after that.

Our usual Meta campaigns involve competitor research, audience planning, and a detailed campaign strategy as part of the planning process.

We agreed with Concern to move some of those stages to the middle of the campaign, so we could get up and running much sooner.

So we got to work:

We planned the audiences that would be most likely to respond to the appeal
We got a suite of ad content together
We launched the campaign and optimised every day the campaign was live.

What we achieved

This campaign was a success, achieving a return on ad spend over 1.0.

Optimisation was a challenge due to low cookie opt-ins. So it’s likely that there were many more results than we were able to report on via the Meta platform.

We got more results than just the money we raised:

Most of the donations came from donors who were new to Concern as a charity to support. So Concern now has a new group of donors that they can steward into becoming regular givers, to support the charity in other ways, and join them in their mission to end extreme poverty.
We refined our emergency processes even further. So we were able to go live with the next emergency campaign (for Pakistan) in less than 24 hours.
We gained a deeper insight into audience groups that work well for Concern. We applied this insight into the next emergency appeal.

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