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Challenge

Christmas is a key time of year for fundraising for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). Following the success of its 2023 fundraising campaign, which saw a 15% increase in donations from TV alone, we were tasked with propelling existing and new donors to urgently help save the lives of people affected by trauma in conflict environments by bringing them as close to the work of MSF as possible.

Alongside these short-term goals, MSF has ambitious long-term fundraising growth targets. We needed to use this campaign to test new channels and gain performance insights that, when combined with econometric learnings, would help to inform future fundraising strategy.

Marketing Insight

MSF’s audience is unique in the charity market. They are educated and adventurous, younger than average charity supporters and highly digitally literate. ‘Typical’ charity appeals, which lean more into tired tropes and aim to pull on the emotional heart-strings, often leave them cold. They are rational thinkers and need to know that their money will be invested well. They see MSF as distinct from other similar charities and admire its front-line, professional and direct approach.

DRTV, press and radio are long-established in reaching this audience and are core to MSF’s above-the-line activity. The importance of these channels has been underpinned through econometrics modelling which has shown their worth beyond standard attribution tools. Nonetheless, we have a strong test-and-lean culture at MI Media and want to accelerate our learnings through every new campaign. We also wanted to ensure we were future proofing the charity against people’s changing media consumption habits. The increased budgets for MSF’s winter appeal combined with a seasonal increase in propensity to donate presented us with the opportunity to explore tests that expanded on these core channels through their digital counterparts.

Media Innovation

We had seen a growing shift from linear into more accessible digital services in the charity space: VOD for TV, online press and newsletters for news consumption and the growing podcast space in audio. We therefore proposed putting 15% of our budget into testing these channels.

For TV, MSF has a working audience, meaning they are less likely to consume DRTV and more likely to watch TV in the evenings. This informed a combined approach with Channel4 and Sky Performance. We chose to invest the majority of our budget into Channel4 and Channel4 BVOD as they aligned most closely with our audience. Activity ran from 1st November to 31st December with contextual buys across C4 News during a peak week for charitable giving for the client. This was supported by a test with Sky Performance which gave MSF access to 20% of airtime during peak hours, without paying premium peak pricing.

We focused our press activity on a core mix of national press titles alongside strategic tests which we secured in specialist titles that had shown high average gift values in previous campaigns. As newspaper circulation is dropping and increasing numbers of the target audience are turning to news apps, this linear activity was supported by digital press with premium placements and contextual targeting across news, politics and high-net worth-individuals’ interests.

Finally, in audio, we ran activity across radio stations that index highly against MSF’s audience while taking advantage of our audio partner, Veritonic’s, attribution solution to test podcasts across news and politics.

As well as testing new channels, we secured excellent added value for MSF with 21% added value across linear press and a whopping 73% added value on digital press.

Accelerating Growth

Our investment in new test channels expanded MSF’s reach and we surpassed the benchmarks set across DRTV and Audio. The ROI on our TV activity more than doubled YoY while the tracked average gift value from radio increased 17%. Most importantly, we increased donations by 50% compared to MSF’s 2023 Winter Appeal.

Indications from the initial tests that we ran were encouraging which has enabled us to increase the proportion of investment into continued tests across podcasts and Sky Performance as we go into the Spring Appeal. BVOD and Digital Press will be part of the channel mix once again in the higher budget Winter Appeal 2025.

You can read more about our previous with MSF here.