May 1, 2023
Are you wondering how to promote your charity app? Or maybe you're wondering what is the best way to promote your charity app?
This guide is for all professional fundraisers and social media marketers who want to learn how to use a simple, yet effective method to get people online from strangers to app donors.
To make the best use of this guide, please make sure you have the following tools set up and ready to use:
As a fellow marketer, I can tell you that it's probably easier to set those things up on the go instead of preparing them beforehand, but that's just how I like to work.
Simply put: We tried it, and it flopped. But there is a very simple reason behind why you can live off paid ads for products like sneakers but struggle to get people to donate to your cause the same way.
Donations are about relationships. You support a cause only if you feel somehow connected to the idea or a person you care about. Paid ads are great to capture attention, but not effective at building trust or building a relationship. On the other hand, organic marketing is hard to get started with and grow your donor base, but it is exceptionally good at building relationships between you, your donors, and the cause. This is the reason why you have to combine both to be successful.
The AIDA method was developed by Elias St. Elmo Lewis in 1898 and grew a big following since then. AIDA is an acronym and stands for:
This describes a typical marketing funnel online, where you grab someone's attention, spike their interest in your cause, and fuel the desire to be part of it. In the final step, you give them the chance to take action by donating.
You can use this framework to get more people using your charity app, by grabbing their attention through paid advertisements on Social media and making them like your Facebook page. You spike their interest by posting engaging and informative content on your page regularly. Fuel the desire of being a part of the cause by sending them to your landing page and finally letting them take action by downloading the app.
Let's take a look at each of those steps in detail. Until now, this guide was very conceptual, now we go deep into the topic, so if you have any questions about a specific practice, feel free to contact me here. You can find a glossary at the bottom of the page.
Grabbing someone's attention online gets harder every day. The only way to pierce through the noise in a newsfeed is with good creatives. Targeting gets less important too, as social media users get smarter and more intentional about their click behavior.
If you follow the next few steps, you will master the art of grabbing attention with paid ads and will be able to set up the next section well.
1. Know your audience
Or in other words: Let Facebook know who your audience is. This means, you either have already a Facebook page with a few thousand likes and can create a 5% lookalike audience of it. If you don't, you have to invest at least €500 to help Facebook understand who clicks your ads. How can you do this? Let your ads run for 2 weeks without any targeting options but the country you want to target. After this period you have enough page likes to create a lookalike audience + Facebook knows exactly who clicks on your ads.
2. Setup a campaign in your Facebook ad manager
Please make sure your Facebook page is equipped with a good profile image, a banner, and 3-5 organic posts to make sure people recognize it as a professional page. Once your page starts gaining a following, you can start by posting content. The main goal here is to build trust by building a relationship between you, the donor, and the cause.
Good content again is important. Learn how to create engaging content as an NGO here. When posting, make sure to have those things in mind:
This is the most difficult, but also the most rewarding step: Get them to do something, by fueling a desire. You can do that by showing them that they miss out on so many amazing things, like being part of your community.
How to show that? With organic posts asking to visit the landing page and with paid ads targeting only page likers to also visit your landing page.
Why a landing page? Your app is available in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. You have to have an iPhone to visit the App Store and an Android device to visit the Play Store, so you need an additional step to separate your audience. Also, you can track conversions on your landing page. What does an effective landing page look like? Visit this tutorial here and copy-paste it with your design, that's it!
Organic content: Once or twice per week, post text or an image with a clear call to action to visit the landing page to do something. It could be:
Paid ads:
The final step before people download the app is to learn on the landing page what it is all about and how donors can benefit from the app.
Using a landing page increased the conversion rate on the App Store Page from 3% to 25%.
Top tip: Make your landing page mobile first, as most people will visit from their phones.
After browsing through the page people click on the download button and visit the app store page. You can boost the effectiveness of this page by getting more positive reviews and having high-quality graphics there.
And then, people download the app.
That's it. You successfully transformed a stranger into an app user who will soon be a high-value supporter of your charity.
Niklas loves simplicity and design. As a founder of Felloz he takes on design and marketing challenges and shares them with the community.
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