When Meta overhauled how it delivers ads, the changes moved faster than most of the nonprofit sector could follow. We helped Born This Way Foundation close the gap for the Be There Certificate’s Meta campaigns, applying cross-industry learnings to revamp their creative approach and decrease CPA by 87%.
The Problem
Born This Way Foundation and Jack.org partnered to create the Be There Certificate, a free, online mental health course that teaches people how to recognize signs of mental health struggle, understand their role in offering support, and connect someone to the help they need and deserve. Together, we use paid campaigns on Meta to build awareness and drive sign ups for the course. Through our partnership with Born This Way Foundation’s team, we were able to make them aware of Meta's changes, assess potential impact, and work together to form a solution. Industry best practices became outdated quickly. In nonprofit advertising, the default approach for Meta had been to use highly detailed audience targeting and upload a single batch of creatives at the start of a campaign. While it is still widely used, that approach no longer works and it puts organizations at a disadvantage against advertisers that have adapted.
The Insight
When we assessed how to run more efficient campaigns for the Be There Certificate, we pulled from what was already working elsewhere: creative volume driving down costs in ecommerce, and audience-aligned messaging angles generating more efficient leads for service businesses. On Meta, you're not just competing with other mission-based organizations. Instead, you're bidding for attention against every advertiser on the platform. That raises the bar for creative, and it means what's working in other categories can be directly relevant. What we were seeing across industries pointed in the same direction. The new Meta systems reward quantity, variety, and consistency because creative does the targeting work now. Campaigns that introduce new material regularly outperform those that don't.
The Solution
Instead of a single batch of creative with a similar messaging approach, we shifted to producing more angles and taking bigger swings. New creatives were introduced every one to two weeks during campaign sprints, with both new concepts and iterations on what was already working. We increased their creative volume by 3.4x. The result was a more efficient campaign that didn't depend on any one piece of creative to carry performance and an 87% decrease in CPA.
Testimonial
Mitu Yilma
Vice President of Communications
More projects
