With over 200 people tuning in live to our webinar with Action Against Hunger all about their paid social programme, we were always going to struggle to answer every question.
Read to find answers from Jimmy Perkins (Senior Digital Manager at Action Against Hunger) and Beth Miles (Partner Strategy Lead at Forward Action) on everything from testing, to creative, data, strategy and the all important ROI.
If you missed the session, you can catch up by watching the recording.
RESULTS
How do you measure ROI, and what kind of results are realistic?
Firstly, to clarify – the £1m figure shared in the session refers to total return, not profit after ad spend.
In terms of ROAS for Action Against Hunger (AAH):
- Unrestricted giving direct-to-donate ads campaigns typically achieve between 0.4 and 1.0
- Restricted campaigns can reach between 0.9 and 2.8 (that top end is for standout campaigns)
A key part of the approach is looking beyond short-term returns and focusing on lifetime value (LTV). AAH calculate this by:
- Tracking all donations across a supporter’s lifetime
- Averaging this by acquisition channel
The challenge for AAH is that their programme is quite new, so it’s difficult to do this over a long term period – they tend to look at 3 years worth of giving.
For example, for their email giving programme they looked at the average number of cash gifts a new supporter goes on to make and the percentage of total supporters who go on to make a second gift, then built that into managing a forecast in a model.
What does it actually cost you to acquire supporters?
Action Against Hunger have seen:
- Cost per lead: £1.78
- Cost per cash donor: £41.65
Forward Action’s benchmarks for cost per lead are £1.50-£3.00, with international development organisations sitting towards the higher end of the scale.
How many supporters recruited have gone on to be regular donors each year?
In 2023, AAH had under 3,000 regular donors – they have since increased this to over 10,000 in 2026 through their digital programme (including telemarketing to supporters who signed up through online channels).
STRATEGY
How would you approach paid social for a smaller charity with limited budget?
The key principle is that campaigns need sufficient budget to test, learn, and optimise effectively.
For organisations with smaller budgets where Meta ads may not be performing well, the most effective approach is often to focus on building relationships before asking for donations.
This typically means:
- Starting with lead generation
- Following up with a structured email welcome journey
- Introducing donation asks later
Timing also plays an important role. Campaigns perform best when there’s a clear and relevant “why now” moment. When something that relates to your work is gaining public attention, that’s the time to spend – it gives people a chance to take action on something they’re already thinking about.
Were AAH optimising for one-off or regular giving?
Most ads focused on one-off donations, with a regular giving upsell on the thank you page.
New supporters then receive a 5-email welcome journey, which:
- Builds engagement through stories and actions
- Introduces different ways to get involved and take action
- Ends with a regular giving ask in the fifth email
For the lead generation arm of the programme, we collected phone numbers that fed a telemarketing programme, aiming to recruit regular givers. In the daisy chain journey of the lead generation sign-up tools, we asked for a cash gift.
This reflects a broader strategy of building relationships over time, rather than relying on a single moment of conversion.
What if your audience is mostly beneficiaries and may not be in a financial position to donate?
Make sure your supporters know that they are still important in your fight – whether that’s finding ways for them to use their voice, give their time, or to share campaigns and organise community fundraising.
Invest time and resources in testing how to build a broader audience of supporters and allies who care about the issue but aren’t directly affected, and then build a strong donation funnel for them.
We also recommend thinking about segmenting audiences into allies and beneficiaries, and using tailored messaging for each group.
How can we adapt to the political ads restrictions in the EU?
In regions where political advertising is restricted, organisations are adapting their approach.
One option is to use acquisition tools — such as quizzes or interactive content — that focus on values rather than specific political campaigns. These can help attract supporters who are engaged and more likely to take action beyond the initial sign-up.
From there, you can introduce campaign and donation asks after sign-up, rather than upfront. You can also try moving asks into email journeys.
Working with creators is another route to explore – building your organic social programme and diversifying paid media in programmatic where it is still supported.
CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT
What kind of creative works best for donation ads?
Donation ads typically need more context and explanation to perform well.
It’s a higher-bar ask, so people are less likely to act immediately. This means the creative needs to do more work to answer key questions like:
- Why does this matter?
- Why now?
- Why should I care?
This often means:
- Longer copy
- Imagery that shows how a donation is used – making it more tangible
- Urgency framings, showing the why now
What works best for lower-bar actions like petitions or emailing your MP?
For lower-bar actions, the focus shifts to speed and simplicity. These types of ads tend to perform best when they are:
- Clear
- Direct
- Easy to act on
Because the level of commitment is lower, you don’t need to provide as much context – the priority is making the action feel quick and accessible.
Can you use more abstract “villains” (e.g. hunger)?
One of the most successful tactics for AAH has been spotlighting key political figures in their ads. Creative that features real people or public figures tends to drive strong engagement.
For example, Jimmy shared that images of Sir Keir Starmer have performed particularly well in terms of clicks for AAH.
We haven’t tested using more abstract villains, so we don’t have clear data on how it performs compared to using real individuals. However, we suspect that real life “villains” are likely to be most engaging.
Is it legally okay to use images of people or public figures in ads?
Using images is generally acceptable where they are publicly available with creative commons licenses. You can access these from Wikimedia Commons – they often provide approved official images for public figures.
Do maps and data-led visuals work in the UK?
Yes – UK-focused maps can work just as well as international ones.
This is a particularly useful tactic for elections campaigning, because you can hone in on people’s constituencies / candidates / councils to make it feel really relevant to them – alongside using location targeting on paid ad platforms, so that only people in those areas see the ads that are relevant to them.
How do you source imagery affordably?
We recommend:
- iStock for stock imagery – usually getting an account and buying credits makes it more affordable
- Canva Pro also has a huge amount of stock imagery you’re able to use included in the price, as long as you edit the image, so it can make paying for Canva more cost effective
- Unsplash also has some free imagery, but it’s quite limited
AAH are also able to use their own images from content trips to their country programmes, although these are getting harder and more expensive to organise.
They also have a small budget for Getty to use for rapid-onset emergency appeals where images are hard to come by quickly.
How do you create urgency for more niche causes?
Organisations that don’t have their issue in the news cycle can still create urgency. For example, you could:
- Create graphics that say “URGENT” before a powerful stat you want to bring to life
- Create an image with a ‘Breaking news’ headline, that also has a powerful stat or story underneath it
- Use graphic devices, like countdown clocks
- Hook off key, relevant moments in a calendar e.g. ‘This Father’s Day’
TECHNICAL SET-UP
Are Meta lead forms or website forms better?
Our data across a range of partners and campaigns show in-platform lead gen forms successfully bring in leads at very cheap rates – however, their lifetime value is lower.
We find that the most engaged supporters are recruited via an optimised sign-up form. That’s why we developed our Blueprint sign-up form tool, to make it easier for more organisations to develop high-performing sign up pages to power their campaigns.
With in-platform lead forms, there are quite a few constraints to consider:
- You can’t daisy chain actions to start building action-taking behaviour with new supporters – you can only add one action on the thank you page of the form, and that’s it
- You have very little real estate on the forms to personalise them and add in more context about your issue area
- You have to get the data out of Meta and into your email platform – this often needs to be managed manually, taking up team capacity
That being said, in-platform lead gen forms are a great way to start testing list growth programmes without investing in new tech. You should consider your welcome journey carefully to make sure you’re doing what you can to properly engage these new supporters.
Do you all use your contact lists for audiences? We’ve run into some GDPR issues previously because our ads are run through a third party.
Many organisations use their supporter lists within paid social — particularly for exclusions, lookalike audiences, and sometimes for targeting.
For example:
- Excluding existing supporters helps avoid spending budget reaching people who have already taken action
- Lookalike audiences can help find new people with similar behaviours or characteristics
- In some cases, targeting existing donor audiences can drive strong results — particularly for donation campaigns, where we often see higher ROAS from people who already have a relationship with the organisation
For Action Against Hunger, supporter data is regularly uploaded to Meta for exclusions, so they aren’t targeting people who have already donated. This is done in line with their privacy policy.
If your privacy policy allows it, using supporter data can help you give Meta more information to better target or exclude, making sure your budget is going towards the people you want to engage.
Where using customer lists isn’t possible, there are still useful alternatives within Meta. For example, you can build audiences based on platform data — such as excluding people who have signed up in the last 180 days, or targeting people who have recently suggested they might donate (using the initiative checkout pixel event) or people who have donated (using the donate pixel event). These aren’t as robust as first-party data, but they can still help improve efficiency and targeting.
Have you had any success with Google AdGrants?
Action Against Hunger runs a Performance Max campaign on Google Grants which brings in a small volume of donations each month at a strong ROAS.
Do you recommend having Conversion API enabled?
In theory, using the Conversions API should help you get more bang for your buck, because it gets around the pixel and cookie issues by using data from the CRM and feeding it back into Meta.
However, we have AB tested the Conversion API alongside using Meta pixel events, and have seen different results.
We would recommend testing this, as there is a good chance you could see better results.
How are you benchmarking Meta Advantage+ vs manual campaigns?
AAH tested Adv+ for direct to donate ads initially last year during their Gaza campaign, running an Adv+ ad set alongside a Facebook and Instagram ad set. ROAS was higher for the Adv+ campaign, and they have run Adv+ ever since.
They performed a similar test for their lead gen campaign last year and saw cost/conversion decrease.
INTERNAL PROCESSES
How should you approach reporting?
The most important part is to start by agreeing what success looks like and which metrics you need to track in order to optimise in real time. From there, teams can build a simple, consistent template reporting sheet to capture that data.
Depending on what platforms you’re using, they will have their own reports built in, but it might be worth setting yourselves up in Google Analytics and using their reports and Looker Studios to create dashboards that help you look at your performance data in a simple and regular way. The focus should be on making insights easy to access and act on, so optimisation can happen in real time.
This is also an area where Forward Action supports organisations – helping define the right metrics and build reporting frameworks that are clear, practical, and easy to use. Get in touch if you’d like to chat about how we could support your organisation!
How long should you test for?
Action Against Hunger typically test over 1–2 weeks before making decisions to scale or switch off.
More broadly, the right timeframe depends on how quickly you can gather enough data to make a confident decision.
On platforms like Meta, ad sets generally need around 50 conversion events to properly optimise. For donation campaigns, that can require a significant amount of spend — for example, if your cost per donor is £25, you’d need to spend around £1,250 to reach that level. For smaller budgets, that may mean running tests over a longer period to gather enough data.
In those cases, it can be more effective to optimise towards higher-volume actions like clicks or traffic. This allows campaigns to move out of the learning phase more quickly and gives you earlier signals on what’s working.
The goal is to run tests until you have a clear enough picture of performance to make a decision.
How do you handle negative or harmful comments?
Sadly, this is something that is impacting many organisations, and it can be hard to tackle. We recommend a combination of approaches:
- You can add a list of banned words, relevant to your cause, to Meta – so any comments that contain them are automatically deleted
- You can also turn on a profanity filter
- You could use audience targeting to target those less likely to leave hateful comments e.g. people who align with your cause
- Ensure the team has an approved FAQ doc with answers
- Have a team rota for ad moderation to reduce burden on individuals in the team – it’s also important to consider who is responsible for ad moderation, as certain comments will impact some colleagues more, and we must be mindful of that
- Refresh ad sets to remove hateful comments
- As a last resort you could turn off comments
How big is your creative and marketing team?
AAH’s digital mobilisation working group has nine members from across their Digital, Individual Giving, Advocacy and Data teams.
For smaller teams, the priority is to:
- Focus on lead generation
- Build and nurture an email list
- Keep testing and creative simple
What do you mean when you say you focused on working ‘quicker’?
The AAH digital team aim to go out to the market within 24 hours of the decision being made to go to appeal – sometimes even quicker.
It helps that they’re an emergency response charity, so it’s built into their culture – but they generally set up a quick project group meeting to delegate tasks and then use Teams channels for quick sign off.
Usually the thing that holds them back is waiting for approved messaging from the country.
They also have templates set up in Canva to help speed up the process of developing new creative.
Thanks again to everyone who joined the session – we hope these answers are helpful.
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