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Challenge

The UK events fundraising market has slowly shifted back to in-person experiences post-Covid. In-person events made up 90% of the top 25 charity events that made the most money in 2024 and, according to JustGiving, the average amount raised per page for virtual walking events declined in the same year.

As Prostate Cancer UK’s flagship in-person event, March for Men was therefore the charity’s biggest opportunity to grow its fundraising potential. However, the event faced stiff competition from the likes of London Legal Support Trust, Cancer Research UK, Lymphoma Action, Back on Track and Ultra Challenge; all of which organise walking events throughout June.

In addition, Prostate Cancer UK had to contend with being placed in a restricted category on Meta which meant that we could not use the usual landing page for this event in conjunction with a conversion focused campaign objective.

Marketing Insight

Firstly, to tackle the restriction issue, we ran forecasting and predicted that the drop-off in signups to March for Men would be too severe if we ran a link click campaign using a restricted page on Meta. We therefore advised that the client invest in a JustGiving microsite which would allow us to continue to use conversion objectives.

Our strategy was to drive efficiency and sign-up volumes. Because of the channels’ historic success and ability to support both geographic & smart targeting and high-intent user capture; we prioritised Meta and Search as high-performing, conversion-focused channels. While TikTok hadn’t historically performed as well, we decided to include it in the channel mix to diversify activity and help Prostate Cancer UK future-proof its digital activity following Meta’s unexpected restrictions.

Marketing Insight

Media Innovation

We developed a full-funnel strategy to ensure that we were targeting the right audiences at each stage of the journey, from awareness to conversion. By combining precise audience segmentation, lookalike targeting and retargeting, we could optimise budget allocation to the highest-performing segments while maintaining a focus on efficiency and cost control.

We ran the campaign across Meta, Google (both Search and new campaign types PMax and Demand Gen) and TikTok. Each channel was chosen based on its ability to effectively reach and convert our target audience while ensuring efficiency and control over CPA.

On Meta, we used a combination of lookalike audiences and geographical targeting of audiences close to the March for Men event location to expand reach effectively. Advantage Plus campaigns meant we could use Meta’s algorithm to optimise for conversions at scale. Retargeting through ad view, site visitors and direct list-based retargeting ensured that we captured and converted users who showed an interest, enhancing mid- and bottom-of-funnel performance.

Similarly to Meta, we used TikTok for its smarter location targeting, lookalikes and retargeting. It also allowed us to reach a different audience demographic and use UGC-led content.

On Google, we targeted both high-intent users already familiar with Prostate Cancer UK and broader audiences searching for related events using a combination of brand and generic PPC ad copy. This was complemented by top-and-mid-funnel activity across Performance Max and Demand Gen which increased awareness across other Google products such as Gmail and Maps while also increasing search demand.

Management Intelligence

The two key benchmarks across the March for Men campaign were a fundraising target of £188k and a CPA of £89, both of which were informed by past campaign performance. To exceed these, we focused on data-led optimisation and agile budget management with daily checks across all platforms.

Audience performance was reviewed to identify the most effective groups so we could be agile and move budgets to better performing ad groups or even platforms. Meanwhile, creative performance including GIFs, videos and UGC were A/B tested to optimise against engagement and conversion rates. We could also see which creatives were reaching fatigue so we could replace them quicker. Retargeting was measured separately to evaluate its impact on mid-and-bottom-of-funnel conversions. Finally, across Google we monitored search impression share and lost share to ensure we maximised high-intent reach.

 

Accelerating Growth

Our paid media activity drove £229.8k fundraising income, beating our target by 22%. Meanwhile, we reduced the CPA by 17% year-on-year. In the end, we had to stop the campaign a few days ahead of schedule as the event was oversubscribed.