East Cheshire Hospice has cared for individuals suffering from life-limiting illnesses since 1988. Their aim is to improve their patients’ quality of life by providing practical assistance and emotional support.

The Brief

WHAT WE DID

Donations are the key to East Cheshire Hospice’s (ECH) survival. As a charity servicing specific locations, sourcing donations from other areas is challenging. They already had regular contributors, but needed to encourage repeat donations and reach new areas. Due to this, there were two things ECH required help with: improving their donation offering to increase contributions and using their Google PPC grant to reach new people.

We focused on creating a complete user journey with an interactive and immersive landing page that had a carefully crafted information architecture. Our goal was to showcase exactly what ECH does and highlight the importance of contributions while inspiring and guiding the user toward becoming a regular donator. Once we’d refactored the complete on-site journey for regular donators, we then went on to manage their £10K monthly Google grant to increase donations. Doing this allowed us to drive targeted traffic into the optimised onsite funnel we’d created.

Creating East Cheshire Champions

The first step in our journey was to generate an idea that would celebrate regular donators. To ECH, regular donators are their heroes; they wanted to shout about all the amazing work these heroes help them do.

We came up with the concept of East Cheshire Champions; a way for ECH to give thanks to these donators. Each regular contributor was given their own ‘Top Trumps’ style profile that could be shared across social media platforms and be shown on TV screens throughout the hospice. We also added a dedicated section to the website highlighting the benefits of becoming an East Cheshire Champion, such as gaining exclusive access to the hospice, receiving rundowns of how their donations have been used, and having the opportunity to contribute ideas.

Alongside East Cheshire Champions, one of the main goals of our landing page was to showcase that, with something as small as giving up one cup of coffee a month, people can make a real difference to someone’s final weeks. One of the best ways to do this was by creating a dedicated section on the landing page that breaks down a £1 donation.

We also wanted to demonstrate the impact of varying monthly donations. In line with staying interactive and immersive, we created buttons containing differing donation amounts that, when clicked, show how these donations are used.

The final goal of the landing page was to streamline the donation process, making it easier to become a regular contributor. The previous sign-up process was clunky and uninviting. We created a quick and simple experience that put a stop to people frustratingly bouncing off the page.

To help with this, we implemented pop-art-style ‘Donate’ buttons throughout the page that navigated the user to a form where they can select the amount they wish to donate. We then implemented a follow-up process once a donator had signed up, giving them the chance to create a full user profile.

The PPC Brief

The brand new landing page optimised user journeys and focused on the true power of donations and the heroes that make them. Once completed, we were well-equipped to ramp up our digital marketing strategies with PPC.

Nonprofit organisations are eligible for a $10K monthly Ad Grant from Google. Some caveats must be adhered to such as maintaining a CTR above 5% and being limited to a $2 CPC. ECH didn’t have the skill set in-house to take full advantage of paid search and generate the most ROI under these conditions. That’s where we came in to play.

1.0

Laying The Foundations

At the start of every new partnership, we interrogate past activity (if it exists), research the target market, and engross ourselves in our client’s brand as much as possible. It’s this in-depth preparation that helps us determine the best strategic approach.

ECH had only dabbled in PPC previously. Due to not having the option to analyse an abundance of historic activity, we took the time to perform in-depth market research, along with keyword research, to form the baseline for our strategy.

2.0

Expanding Existing Activity

Within their ongoing brand activity, we included site link extensions to our East Cheshire Champions page, and other pages that would potentially be of interest such as their Challenge Ideas Generator. The idea of this activity was to put ECH on the radar of potential donators in order to generate engagement and donations.

3.0

Targeting Decisions

Additionally, because ECH is a local hospice, we also had to consider that only people in Cheshire and surrounding areas would be interested in supporting a Cheshire-based hospice. We navigated this with radius targeting on all our PPC campaigns, focusing specifically on the North West. We also made events ECH was holding a focus of campaign activity.

From our keyword research, we made the decision to bid on niche and longer-tail terms with a lower CPC that were still well-suited to ECH and their cause. These keywords, although relevant, are naturally lower in search volume. So, to counteract this, we opted to use broad match ads, giving us the chance to reach wider audiences. Essentially, this means that people who search for a key term on Google will be shown ads for closely related keywords, rather than just an exact match.

4.0

Effective Techniques

Finally, in order to source extra opportunities, we utilised dynamic search ads (DSAs) to bolster traffic to the ECH website. Within DSA campaigns, Google matches the search query with the content on a landing page and will create a headline based on onsite content and search queries. This kind of ad offers a cost-effective way of being listed in search results for relevant keywords you may not otherwise rank for.

The Results

East Cheshire Hospice achieved some fantastic results on their PPC activity:

2,200%

Increase in conversions

22%

Decreased the cost of conversion

99%

Decrease in CPA

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