$16M
Helped Raise
CDC Foundation raises over $16 million for COVID-19 relief
6
Custom Video Spots
$10M
Facebook Match
UNSDG 5: Gender equality and empower all women and girls
“The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are a call for action by all countries – poor, rich and middle-income – to promote prosperity while protecting the planet. They recognize that ending poverty must go hand-in-hand with strategies that build economic growth and address a range of social needs including education, health, social protection, and job opportunities, while tackling climate change and environmental protection. ” – United Nations
The Cause
The CDC Foundation is dedicated to helping the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) save and improve lives by unleashing the power of collaboration among governments, philanthropies, corporations, organizations and individuals. In its work, the CDC Foundation is the only nonprofit authorized by Congress to mobilize philanthropic partners and private-sector resources. The CDC Foundation strives to extend CDC’s lifesaving work to protect the health, safety and security of America and improve health access across the world. This undertaking couldn’t be more urgent during the COVID-19 pandemic. At both the CDC Foundation and VidMob Gives, we believe that “together our impact is greater.”
Our Partnership
The success of this campaign was rooted in a solid network of partnerships. The CDC Foundation first coordinated with Facebook to double all donations—up to $10 million. To our luck, VidMob officially became a certified partner of Facebook in 2017. Due to our well-established history together, VidMob was then enlisted by Facebook to create a promotional video for the CDC Foundation’s COVID-19 emergency response fund.
Donations to the response fund are supporting a variety of pressing on-the-ground needs. The priorities of the CDC Foundation are centered around deploying emergency staffing to U.S. public health agencies, meeting the needs of vulnerable communities, purchasing medical and lab equipment for the response, supporting communications campaigns, and addressing health inequities exacerbated by COVID-19, and much more. VidMob and our creators were of particular value in creating social videos and messaging that highlighted the need.
VidMob created 2 original concepts for in-feed Facebook based on Creative Intelligence. Following a mid-campaign performance analysis in Q2 2020, VidMob optimized the original concepts to create 2 new concepts.
The Result
Without any source assets besides a logo and style guide, VidMob developed 6 custom video spots in 6 days that supported the CDC Foundation’s goal of raising $5 million that would receive a 2 to 1 match from Facebook. From April to June 2020, VidMob leveraged Creative Intelligence to monitor performance, exploring different creative questions and updating the videos in real time based on data-backed learnings. Our key learnings demonstrated:
- Across both platforms (Facebook and Instagram), In-Feed ads resulted in a 318% lift in CTR compared to Story ads.
- Viewers felt more compelled to click when donation messaging referenced the viewer as an individual, rather than as part of a larger group.
- Personalized “You” statements had higher completion rates by 11% over “All of Us” messaging.
- For Facebook in-feed creative, the call to action drove clicks by 6% when phrased as a demand rather than a consideration.
While the CDC Foundation ran three media flights throughout the duration of the campaign, VidMob noticed a significant dip in performance during the second flight. Timing and story placement were crucial. With the growing momentum of the Black Lives Matter Movement, the focus of the U.S. news cycle shifted from the pandemic to the equally important issue of racial injustice. All of this took shape the day before the second flight of media went live, leaving potential donors worldwide to reconsider how to allocate donation dollars. With an influx of nation-wide donations, this shift in the media’s attention created a false-acceleration in viewer fatigue. Two weeks after the second media flight ended, however, Flight 3 commenced and we saw a significant rise in performance.
COVID-19 has illustrated how adaptability and resilience are the most crucial components of success, and these traits are critical to our creative strategy. At VidMob Gives, we’ve seen nonprofits fundamentally restructure their fundraisers and volunteering programs since COVID-19’s outbreak. Similarly, we must respond deftly to the fluctuations in digital marketing and the changing landscape of the social justice arena worldwide. As captured by VidMob’s CEO, Alex Collmer: “Creative strategy is in a state of constant flux because it’s tethered to culture. And culture is changing constantly.”
“When we first reviewed the results of the creative after Flight 2 we were admittedly shocked. How could optimized creative have gone so wrong? That’s when we looked beyond the data to understand what other factors, such as current events or political climate, may have contributed to this dip. By looking at the data through this new lense, it became clear why our videos underperformed compared to the original. However, we stood by our initial insights from the first media flight, as well as learnings from the second flight, and after some time had passed, the final round of optimized creative ran. We saw the improved performance we had anticipated from the start. Sometimes there are outside factors you can not anticipate that impact video performance, but as always, we remained adaptable and savvy throughout.”
Ilyssa Bernstein,
Senior Account Strategist at VidMob
The Creator Network
The VidMob Foundation is fueled by the active engagement of incredible freelance creative professionals on the VidMob platform. They’re some of the world’s most talented creators, and, time and again, have willingly dived in to offer their time and skills for charities around the world. No matter the size of the ask, or the significance of the cause, these creators believe in using creativity as a force for good, just as we do.
Tomi Földes
Video Editor