It’s officially November, which means fundraisers everywhere are gorging on discount Halloween candy and feverishly finalizing their year-end campaigns. And with multi-channel integration being the name of the game these days, charities of every shape and size are learning how to use social media to connect and communicate with their donors.

Thus, while Facebook’s dynamic creative feature has been available for a while now, many in the field of fundraising are only just learning about its uses, and how it can help optimize your fundraising or lead generation campaigns.

WHAT IS DYNAMIC CREATIVE?

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, dynamic creative (as it pertains to Facebook) is a feature available to those creating ads in Facebook’s Ad Manager.

Instead of selecting a single image, text and call-to-action for each individual ad, dynamic creative allows you to upload a variety of images, videos and copy options for use within a single ad. Facebook, in all its infinite wisdom, uses these assets to find the combination that elicits the most response, and then continues to serve the “winning” assets to your audience.

WHEN TO USE IT

  • Your organization is just getting its feet wet with digital ads. If you’re new to the Facebook ad world, dynamic creative is a great tool to get started. You can upload a variety of images and copy options, and let Facebook do the work to determine which combinations your audience likes best.
  • You’re looking to target an unfamiliar audience, or want to try new campaign creative. You might have a good handle on what your donors respond to online, but you’re interested in prospecting. Or perhaps you have always promoted one-time gifts, but want to try a monthly giving campaign. Using dynamic creative can give you a good idea of what works and what doesn’t before you roll out a larger or longer-term campaign.
  • You want Facebook to help with the heavy-lifting. Instead of creating 10 separate ads, dynamic creative allows you to throw all your assets in one ad, and then you can sit back and let Facebook’s algorithm take care of optimization for you.

WHEN YOU MIGHT WANT TO AVOID IT

  • You have a very specific testing strategy. While you’ll be able to see which assets and combinations are performing best in Ads Manager, you won’t get the detailed analytics you might receive from an ad set you manage on your own. If you need more data, with more measurements, you’ll want to execute a more traditional A/B test. My fellow Good Worker Alison has some really smart testing recommendations if you’re looking for ideas!
  • Your ad assets are widely different. The key with dynamic creative is that each copy and creative option needs to be able to work together in one ad. For example, you wouldn’t be able to upload a photo of an elephant and a photo of a cheetah with a text option that reads, “An elephant never forgets.” All your copy options need to work with all the creative options, and vice versa.
  • You’d rather do the work yourself. Many of us are fundraising data nerds and the idea of letting Facebook take the reins in choosing ad combinations is blasphemy! If that’s how you feel, I hear you! But it might not be a bad idea to test a dynamic creative ad against one of your own ad sets, and see if there’s any difference in performance.

Still have questions? Put down the candy wrapper and shoot me an email. And have a happy year-end fundraising season!