Tools & solutions
Get started & fundraise
Plan your campaigns.
Explore how to enhance your marketing strategies using ads to increase donations, scale volunteer programs, acquire volunteers and more.
If you are new to advertising or want to learn more about our policies for ads about social issues, start here.
Begin by choosing an objective.
Before you create an ad, first consider your organization’s goals. It’s important to know what you want to achieve so that you can choose the right objective.
Your advertising objective is what you want people to do when they see your ads. For example, if you want to recruit supporters, you can create ads that will encourage people to sign up for your cause.
The objective you choose is important because it helps our system determine the most effective ways to run your ads, which can make your budget go further.
On-Facebook Donation Ads.
Nonprofit organizations which have onboarded to Facebook and Instagram fundraising tools can now raise donations directly through On-Facebook Donation Ads.
The new ads product enables your nonprofit to fundraise through Facebook directly, and does not require a nonprofit website. Your donors can also opt-in to share their contact information in a privacy-safe way so you can reach them in the future.
Additionally, On-Facebook Donation Ads allow your nonprofit to benefit from personalized advertising with two new Custom Audiences: Previous Donors and Previous Fundraiser Creators.
On-Facebook Donation ads can be launched and measured through Ads Manager to see which strategies, like creative or audience, work best. Like with any new strategy, test On-Facebook Donation Ads with your nonprofit's existing campaign plan to see how direct donation ads on Facebook can help improve fundraising.
Make the most of your budget.
You can run ads on Facebook and Instagram on any budget. The exact cost associated with your ad being shown to someone is determined in our ad auction.
Budgets
Once you have started advertising, you can take a closer look at past costs and start to make decisions about how to best spend your advertising dollars moving forward. It helps to have a clear goal in mind for what you want your ads to accomplish, as well as an amount you’re comfortable spending daily and for the entire length of the campaign. Learn more about budget settings options that will allow you to control your overall spend for a campaign or ad set and ensure you don't overspend.
Our tools can determine the best way to distribute your budget across ad sets so that you get the best results for your campaign. To make your budget go further, we recommend that you set up your ad spend at the campaign level rather than at the ad level.
Learn more about how to optimize your campaign budget and about Meta bid strategies.
HERE ARE SOME TOOLS AVAILABLE THROUGH ADS MANAGER THAT CAN HELP YOU OPTIMIZE YOUR BUDGET
- Historical data. If you’ve run ads before, you can look at your past costs to understand how much money you will need to accomplish your goals. If you haven’t yet run ads, you can get started for as little as $1 per day.
- Potential reach estimate. This estimates how many people your ad could potentially reach depending on the targeting and ad placement options you select when creating an ad.
- Estimated daily results. If there’s enough data available, we can make estimations about how many people you can reach and how many results you can get per day if you were to spend your full daily budget or scheduled lifetime budget.
Ad auctions
We use an ad auction to determine the best ad to show to a person at a given point in time. The winning ad maximizes value for both the people seeing the ad, as well as the organization running the ad. Understanding the ad auction can help you understand your ad performance.
Each time an ad is shown, our ads delivery system learns more about the best people and places to show the ad. The more an ad is shown, the better the delivery system becomes at optimizing the ad's performance.
When you create a new ad set or make a significant edit to an existing one, the delivery system enters the learning phase, and the delivery column reads "Learning". During this phase, since the system is still exploring the best way to deliver your ad set, performance is often less stable and cost per result is usually not as strong.
Ad sets exit the learning phase as soon as performance has stabilized, typically after around 50 optimization events within a maximum of a seven-day period (usually it takes less than seven days.) Even though the learning phase is short, the delivery system never stops learning about the best way to optimize ad sets.
Reach your audience.
Targeting is an important part of your advertising campaign. This is how you define the audience you want to reach with your message. With accurate targeting, you can get closer to achieving your goal, whether it’s getting people to donate to your organization or volunteer for your cause.
We will automatically show your ads to people who are most likely to find your ads relevant. You can further refine your targeting with these three types of audiences.
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Core Audiences
Core audiences are audiences that can be built in Meta Ads Manager directly. Common examples of core audiences include location-based audiences (such as states or zip codes) and demographic audiences (including age and gender). Advertisers can also create detailed audiences that leverage common behaviors or interests that people have on Facebook or Instagram, like running or owning pets.
Custom Audiences
Connect with people who have expressed an interest in your organization, such as by opting into your newsletter, volunteering or making a donation.
Lookalike Audiences
Reach people across Meta technologies who have similar characteristics or interests as your current supporters, staff or beneficiaries.
Get creative.
Once you have determined your objective, budget and target audience, now you can start to have some fun. Think about creative ways to engage your audience, whether it’s through videos, quizzes or imagery, while also considering where to place your ads to get the best results.
Ad placements
Ad placements refer to the different places your ads can appear, such as on Facebook News Feed, Facebook Stories, Instagram Feed, Instagram Stories, Messenger and more. You can learn about all ad formats and placements in our Meta Ads Guide and see placements by objective here.
When you create an ad, you can select the ad placement. We recommend choosing Advantage+ Placements because it allows Meta’s delivery system to make the most of your budget. It places your ads on all placements available for your settings on Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and Audience Network, which can help you find a wider audience and get the best results.
Asset customization for placements lets you tailor creative assets to placements on Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and Meta Audience Network. Use this feature to customize your ads for the audience behavior and best practices of each placement and to make sure that your ad can run in as many places as possible.
Brand safety allows you to control where your ads are delivered on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Audience Network. You can prevent your ads from appearing within or alongside content and publishers that aren't suitable to your brand. We have a multifaceted approach to brand safety: settings that can be applied to your entire ad account and controls that you can apply for your specific brand needs.
Creative considerations
When creating an ad, there are several types of ad formats you can choose from, including video, image, carousel and more. Using a mix of assets often leads to the best results. Get creative in how you build successful ads.
WE HAVE IDENTIFIED FIVE FOUNDATIONAL CREATIVE CONSIDERATIONS FOR NONPROFITS TO BUILD SUCCESSFUL CAUSE-DRIVEN ADS:
- Be upfront with the problem: Make a clear case for the problem we are trying to solve. The “why” is the hook to get people into the conversion.
- Show there is a specific and tangible solution: People need to believe there is a feasible way to make an impact right now, or they’ll scroll right by.
- Ease into action: Offer an easy way for people to act on or off-platform with a clear and immediate call to action.
- Make the cause the hero: Allow the cause to shine. That is the reason why people will want to get involved. The brand and entity should not be protagonists.
- Share the mic: Consider if you are the right voice. If not, give the mic to the person who has credibility and authenticity in this space and use your power to amplify.
Measure success
Once you have created an ad, determined who your audience is and decided where to place it, you might consider measuring your ad’s success.
You can choose from different measurement tools based on your level of expertise and how deep you want to dive into testing.
MEASUREMENT CAN HELP YOU
- Better allocate your media spend to be more efficient and effective.
- Establish organizational accountability by spending smarter.
- Gain valuable insight into how your ad is performing.
- Learn from and improve your ad strategy.
- Drive better outcomes.
Ads Reporting
Ads Reporting is a feature within Ads Manager that allows you to view up-to-date data on the performance of your ads and schedule reports on your ad performance based on a set of parameters that you choose. It can help you determine how your organization’s ads are contributing to your advertising goals.
You can view results at the account level, or get a high-level view of how all your campaigns are doing and apply breakdowns to see the metrics you care about.
It’s important to note that for paid advertising, engagement metrics such as likes, comments and shares don’t predict more meaningful metrics, like number of donations or outcomes aligned with media campaign objectives.
Meta pixel
The Meta Pixel is a piece of code for your website that lets you measure, optimize and build audiences for your ad campaigns. It can help you better understand the effectiveness of your advertising and the actions people take on your site, like visiting your website or donating.
META PIXEL ENABLES YOU TO:
- Measure cross-device conversions.
- Optimize delivery to people likely to take action.
- Create custom audiences from website visitors.
Conversions API
When you use Conversions API along with our other Meta tools, you can gain additional insights into the people who interact with your organization. Conversions API helps you measure and optimize your ad campaigns for the outcomes you want using data you control rather than data from a browser.
It is best to use Conversions API in addition to the Meta Pixel. The Meta Pixel continues to be an effective tool in cases where your customers have unblocked cookies on their web browsers, or if they use web browsers that have not yet blocked cookies by default. Conversions API doesn’t use cookies, so web browser settings don’t impact your ability to send data from customers that have provided you with all necessary consents (if any).
Used together, the Meta Pixel and Conversions API will maximize the effectiveness of your website visitor data.
Testing ad solutions.
You can use different experiments to determine whether your campaign was effective and if it was responsible for the results you achieved.
There are three ways to test the effectiveness of your ads: A/B testing, brand lift and conversion lift.
A/B testing
A/B testing lets you change variables, such as your ad creative, audience or placement, to determine which strategy performs best and to help improve your future campaigns. A/B testing helps ensure your audiences will be evenly split and statistically comparable, as opposed to informal testing, which can lead to overlapping audiences.
To run an effective experiment, you should first choose a hypothesis - or question - you want your experiment to answer. For example, you might hypothesize that a custom audience strategy will outperform an interest-based audience strategy for your nonprofit. An A/B test lets you quickly compare both strategies to see which one performs best.
After choosing the variable you want to test, we’ll divide your budget to equally and randomly split exposure between each version.
Brand Lift
A Brand Lift test can help you understand the impact of your ad on intent to take an action. You can measure the effect of ads on perceptions by measuring the difference between a randomized test (people who saw your ad) and a control group (people who didn’t see your ad). To learn more about available options, minimums to run this study and best practices, see our Brand Lift checklist.
Conversion Lift
Conversion Lift helps you understand how effective your ad is at driving incremental conversions such as donations or volunteer sign-ups. The test measures the difference in conversions between a randomized test group (people who saw your ad) and a control group (people who didn’t see your ad). Conversion Lift works best when combined with a Conversions API.
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