Work Nonprofit Metropolitan Ministries

Metropolitan Ministries

Industry

What We Did

Powering year-round giving to meet urgent community needs.

Metropolitan Ministries partnered with Big Sea to strengthen its marketing and fundraising efforts during critical year-end giving periods, helping mobilize donors to meet urgent community needs. What began with strategic fundraising campaigns evolved into a broader engagement, including a full website redesign to better support storytelling, donor experience, and long-term growth.

Together, our teams built a more cohesive digital presence, aligning campaigns, messaging, and website experience to support sustainable giving and ensure Metropolitan Ministries could continue serving individuals and families across the community.

The Goal

A full digital glow-up

In 2018, Metropolitan Ministries knew its 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, covering targeted ads, conversion rate optimization, and increased recurring gifts.

Our long-term 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.

The Objectives

Empower a nonprofit to expand their reach

Increase awareness of Metropolitan Ministry’s impact in the Tampa Bay area
Increase new online donors
Reactivate lapsed donors
Increase online giving to exceed industry norms
Set the bar for digital giving in the Tampa Bay area

The Strategy

A strong foundation and wider net

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 Metropolitan Ministries 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:

Multi-channel targeted campaigns on TikTok, Google, Bing, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Spotify, programmatic, and traditional channels
Retargeting: re-engaging prospective donors on Facebook and other platforms with emotional messaging
Contextual email marketing: emails providing real stories and real-time demands, like a shortage of school supplies or Christmas hams
Continually optimized donation flows on the website to eliminate confusion and drive donors toward recurring and larger gift amounts

The Tactics

Building an easier path to donation with a dialed-in digital system

To amplify our marketing strategy, we designed and developed a brand-new nonprofit 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.

Created an entirely new UX approach to pillar pages to get each user to the right piece of content as fast as possible
Created a scrolling page w/ anchor links for the “Get Help” page for users to be able to quickly navigate through the content
Created a dynamic mega-menu for the main website nav, which allowed the team to feature one main/important action for each of the sections
Streamlined the volunteer user journey to 2-3 screens, where it was previously a more confusing and longer process to get to
Implemented content tagging and organized blogs into larger categories so readers can get to content relevant to what they’re searching for
Updated the Corporate Partnership page layout to highlight the variety of customized partnership opportunities available and how to get started

The Strategy

Meeting donors where they want to be met

With a compelling story and demonstrated impact, finding new potential donors became a little easier. We reorganized the nonprofit website to make giving donations the main priority.

Just two clicks from the homepage, a donor can set up easy monthly contributions
Strong, persuasive messaging on the “Ways to Give” page leads donors through unique ways of giving that fit their lifestyle and wallet choice (crypto, Apple Pay, stock, legacy giving, and more)
We even created a cryptocurrency campaign to get the word out that Met Min now accepts crypto donations (need somewhere to dump that Doge?)

So happy to partner with Big Sea. Our marketing mix was spot on. They’re collaborative, nimble, and smart. Their team was able to function as an extension of our marketing staff, which has worked very well.

Justine Burke
VP of Marketing

Results with impact

Not only did we increase brand awareness and close the gap behind their top competitor to under 4%, but Metropolitan Ministries also saw incredible results.

Big Sea was honored with a Silver Addy Award for Consumer Websites Client from the Tampa Bay chapter of the American Advertising Federation.