How Platypus helped Dementia UK recruit 268 challenge event participants

10 second summary

Dementia UK is the specialist dementia nurse charity. Their nurses provide life-changing care for families affected by all forms of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease.

We have worked with Dementia UK to support their digital marketing since 2019. Both teams have developed a strong working relationship and collaborated on increasingly successful digital campaigns.

Our long term working relationship means for each new campaign our teams can build together on the learnings from previous ones. Every campaign process is tighter and even more enjoyable to work on for both Dementia UK and the Platypus team.

What was the challenge?

Do Your Distance is a virtual challenge event – participants choose their own distance to run, sign up via an embedded JustGiving microsite, and then get a stewardship email journey to help them complete the challenge.

They started promoting the event at the peak of the pandemic, when the marketplace for virtual challenges was very crowded.

The challenges team at Dementia UK set us a target cost per acquisition. Our challenge was to meet or beat that target.

What did we do?

We knew that Facebook Ads was the best way to recruit participants for an event like this.

We created an advertising and audience strategy to meet the charity’s CPA goal.
We worked closely with Dementia UK on the ad content to make sure the campaign had informative ad copy and the strongest images.
We regularly refreshed the ad content to make sure audiences didn’t see the same adverts too often. This helped us learn what made people sign up (and what didn’t).
We had fortnightly results calls to keep the challenges team up to date.
We created an end of campaign report that collated all results and learnings from the campaign.

Meta ad example from Dementia UKs virtual challenge event campaign

What we achieved

Our January 2021 campaign brought in 268 signups for Do Your Distance. Those that went on to raise funds went on to raise an average of £382.77 each.

Our average cost per sign up was also 25% lower than the target, making a fabulous use of the charity’s valuable budget.

Our long working relationship with Dementia UK (and our very low staff turnover) created the foundations for this awesome success. Our team knows Dementia UK’s cause, supporters and organisation inside out. So much so that our campaigns together now run like clockwork.

Joanna Sullivan, Head of Community & Events Fundraising at Dementia UK, said:

“The Platypus team were a dream to work with on this campaign. They clearly didn’t just use a boilerplate approach with us – they were flexible, adaptable, and quick to respond. What’s more, they are true Facebook Ads experts. It was the combination of their approach and expertise that made this campaign so successful. Thanks, Platypus!”

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