Sightsavers works in more than 30 countries worldwide to prevent sight loss and avoidable blindness, fight for disability rights and promote equal opportunities for people with disabilities.
Sightsavers had a reasonable online presence but needed to up their paid advertising game to reach a wider audience and bring in more donations.
Long story short, we delivered more than a 70% drop in cost per acquisition (CPA). In other words, after our work, receiving donations cost Sightsavers less than a third that it did before.
The challenge
The Sightsavers team didn’t have enough clarity when it came to budgets, spending, conversions and how everything related to online donations to the charity.
They wanted experts to manage their campaigns and clear, helpful updates on how things were progressing.
They also needed a partner to help them achieve their long term digital ambitions.
At the same time, they needed to keep a tighter hold on the purse strings (like any charity) while bringing in more donations than ever before.
We want to develop real partnerships with our charity clients. So we were able to help them on all fronts.
What we did
We kicked things off with a top-to-bottom review of Sightsavers’ paid Google Ads and Google Ad Grants accounts.
They were using a paid account for all their paid search marketing. However, they also had access to Grantspro, which gave them $40,000 in-kind advertising spend per month.
Our audit, combined with useful insights from Sightsavers’ internal digital analyst, helped us understand exactly how the charity was running its ads. We discussed both short and long-term aims with the digital fundraising team, then built a comprehensive plan to restructure Sightsavers’ accounts based on all these findings.
Finally we set up scripts to improve the accounts’ effectiveness and to optimise ads for conversions.
What we achieved
Restructuring the Grantspro account and strategic management of Sightsavers’ paid search led to more than a 70% drop in CPA. In simple terms, after our work, generating donations cost Sightsavers less than a third of what it had done.
Since we partnered with Sightsavers in 2017, we’ve seen a 202% improvement of ROAS through their paid advertising account. This has been helped, in part, by creating an ‘always-on’ fundraising campaign on their behalf.
The feedback on our work was so positive that it was passed to the board of trustees.
“In a sometimes confusing and murky digital world, the guys at Platypus are a breath of fresh air. They know their stuff, they tell us it straight and really care about the work we do together. There’s a true sense of partnership between the Sightsavers and Platypus teams, which makes working together more productive and more enjoyable.” – Ella Piece, director of fundraising at Sightsavers
