Nonprofit Organization

British Red Cross

Leveraging creative built for Reels to increase fundraising event sign-ups

The British Red Cross is a neutral, independent and impartial humanitarian organization. For the last 150 years, they have been helping millions of people in the United Kingdom and around the world get the support they need when a crisis strikes.

Challenge

The British Red Cross is always looking for new ways to engage their supporters and reach new audiences for their fundraising events. In an attempt to increase engagement and event registrations, they aimed to test a new approach, diversifying their ad creative across two large-scale events: the Edinburgh Marathon and the Hackney Half-Marathon.

Solution

To diversify their creative, the nonprofit developed new videos built for Reels to launch along with their existing static creative. Not only did they implement Reels Best practices (9:16 video with audio, in the safe zone) but they also followed the language of Reels, leveraging captions to make the videos digestible, playing with engaging music and transition trends to ensure it is entertaining & engaging the audience through an insight-led hook to make it relatable.

In order to understand the impact of diversifying their creatives, they implemented an A/B test for the 2 campaigns (Edinburgh Marathon and the Hackney Half-Marathon), to compare their existing strategy versus a new strategy (existing static creative and Reels together).

Results

The A/B tests demonstrated the impact of including diversified creative and formats (creative built for Reels, along with static assets). Indeed, both campaigns that included both Reels and static formats drove greater results & efficiency than the static-only campaigns. The effectiveness of this new strategy was verified across upper and lower funnel metrics, as these campaigns achieved lowered costs per results and per engagement. leading to more event registrations and greater audience engagement:

Impact on Event registration: The Hackney Half-Marathon Reels-first campaign achieved Cost Per Results that were 43% lower than the static-only campaign, while the Edinburgh Marathon Reels campaign achieved Cost Per Results that were 50% lower than the static-only campaign.
Impact on audience engagement: The Hackney Half-Marathon Reels-first campaign achieved a Cost Per Engagement that was 6.7 times lower than the static-only campaign, while the Edinburgh Marathon Reels campaign achieved a Cost Per Engagement that was 11 times lower than the static-only campaign.

Learnings

Utilize new formats and diversifying creative: The British Red Cross demonstrated the value of adding creative builds for Reels along with static assets for their campaigns. This new strategy helped reached more people and driving more conversions.
Adopt a test and learn mindset: By leveraging our A/B testing tool, they managed to understand the impact of our best practices on their results and make tactical optimizations for their campaigns moving forward.