Metropolitan Ministries provides food, housing assistance and educational services that help alleviate suffering, promote dignity, and instill self-sufficiency in the Tampa Bay community and has become one of the largest nonprofit organizations in Florida.
In 2018, Metropolitan Ministries knew their donor acquisition strategies needed a digital rebirth. Their online giving had been stagnant, with a majority of donations coming in through direct mail, while their competitors outpaced them month over month. They turned to Big Sea to build their digital donation strategy – from targeted ads to conversion rate optimization and increased recurring gifts. Our partnership continues to bring in a younger donor base, reactivate lapsed donors, grow gift amounts, and blow their goals out of the water year over year.
With multiple organizations in the area competing for the same donation dollars, we needed to know where to begin. We conducted a brand awareness study to get an understanding of how well potential donors knew of and related to the organization.
With those results in hand, we created video and audio campaigns on Programmatic, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Google, Bing, & Spotify, focused on sharing the Met Min story with unfamiliar prospect donors. Then, we launched a consideration-phase video campaign to help persuade those now-familiar prospects to become a part of the solution to the housing crisis in Tampa Bay.
We rolled out the campaign wherever potential donors might spend their time with both evergreen and seasonal campaigns, emphasizing specific needs when they arose.
This approach included:
To amplify our marketing strategy, we designed and developed a brand new website, integrating modern payment platforms and the Engaging Networks donor management system, to make giving as frictionless as possible.
Most importantly, we wrote a more compelling story and built more intentional user journeys that would lead donors down that path.
With a compelling story and demonstrated impact, finding new potential donors became a little easier. We reorganized the website to make giving donations the main priority.
Big Sea was honored with a Silver Addy Award for Consumer Websites Client from the Tampa Bay chapter of the American Advertising Federation.
Not only did we increase brand awareness and closed the gap behind their top competitor to under 4%, Metropolitan Ministries also saw:
Increase in online fundraising since 2019
FY21 annual online giving goal
Of donations grew to $500 or more
Increase in website site speed & performance
