Case Study: ASRC Christmas Appeal

Funds raised by the ASRC are used to advocate for, and provide over 4,600 people seeking asylum and refugees each year with food, housing, material aid, healthcare, legal aid, education and training, casework and counselling, detention advocacy and employment services.

The ASRC approached Social Garden for assistance with the Christmas Appeal, which came at a time of increased media attention on the issue of detention and refugee rights. The aims of the campaign were twofold,

• A donation ask: for current supporters to donate and send a message of support to those in detention
• A lead generation ask: for people to add their name to an open letter of support to people in detention.

The theme was to deliver a holiday message of hope to those in detention and to let them know that they were not forgotten. Together, our teams designed a strategy wherein the two aims were connected, and those who signed the open letter were then invited to take their message of hope one step further and consider a donation to support the ASRC.

Social Garden used Facebook’s new Dynamic Creative option in order to test and optimise a variety of different campaign images and messaging. We trialled copy in the ads that was factual, colloquial, and with a clear call to action.  We made sure to use creative elements that included the ASRC brand in order to establish trust.

We used a combination of audience lists from the ASRC and targeting identified by our team in order to find people all over Australia who would be familiar with the mission of the organisation. We also identified an audience of people who we could retarget from other asks, and people who had worked with the ASRC online or offline in the past who were likely to want to do more.

Our team then segmented these audiences into different stages of the giving funnel, in order to determine the best place to reach them. We trialled different creative for each audience, and different donation asks that were relevant to the stage of the cycle.

As the campaign evolved on social, we updated the messaging, monitored the posts, and revised and edited images in order to optimise towards the most successful creative. We also kept the audiences focused and adjusted them daily in order to not over saturate the messaging.

We were able to galvanise support from the ASRC’s existing network and use the outpouring of support from the letter into donating. We also tied our messaging to current media stories about refugees and World Human Rights Day to keep the ASRC top of mind for our audience.

We found that a signature on social and follow up SMS for donation worked best to convert the audience at both touchpoints. The content and shareability of the letter worked well on Facebook, and the SMS was a more personal approach to donation. These two streams, combined with an email marketing integration, allowed us to maximise donations by modifying the customer experience.

Overall, the open letter was signed by over 22,000 Australians.  We helped to drive over 2500 donations which will go to support the ASRC this year and into the future.

Our efforts on social drove 62% of that traffic and helped to exceed our fundraising goal by nearly 20%. Our advertising converted into a signature at a rate of 42% and converted 350 donations. We reached nearly a million and a half people on Facebook, 17,024 of whom took action in the form of 17,529 post reactions, 622 post comments, 2,615 post shares, 775 page likes and 11,561 link clinks.

While the aims of this campaign were to deliver a message of hope to people in detention over the holiday season and to support the continued efforts of the ASRC, the outcomes are much more far-reaching.  Our campaigns enabled conversation, spread facts, and gave an achievable call to action to a population looking to help and reach out to a people they had only read about. In a time of mixed messages and confusing facts about refugees and their status, we were able to deliver a true message of hope and deliver a real-world call to action.

To donate to the ASRC, please click here: https://www.asrc.org.au/donate-now/

To get involved with the ASRC, please click here: https://www.asrc.org.au/get-involved/