Scaling impact & revenue for the UK’s biggest crowdfunding platform

Crowdfunder is the UK’s biggest crowdfunding platform, where over £250M has been raised for community groups, start-ups, charities & other causes. Our core brief was to grow the number of projects generated through Paid Search and, more importantly, the revenue associated with those projects (all the while improving efficiency).

Rebuilding the account

When we took over the account in Q3 of 2020, revenue and ROAS attributed to Paid Search was low. We audited the account thoroughly, including reviewing and updating tracking to be more accurate (through proper Google Analytics and GTM setup).

We then rebuilt the Google and Microsoft Ads account based on past performance and new opportunities. There were four main campaigns we launched:

• Brand - to capture searches for Crowdfunder and protect against competitor bidding
• Competitor - to capitalise on searches for similar crowdfunding / fundraising companies and gain market share
• Crowdfunding - to capture non-company specific searches around crowdfunding
• Generic - to capture general searches around fundraising

The first 6 months

The effects of the rebuild were immediate, with revenue increasing 81% in the first quarter after rebuilding and a further 158% in the quarter after that.

Sustained revenue growth

At the start of 2021, after the significant growth of the previous 2 quarters, we sustained that massively elevated revenue over the next 3 quarters.

During this time we plugged Crowdfunder’s internal data into our decision making, allowing us to evaluate what projects were really driving the highest lifetime value and optimise towards those.

Driving fundraising projects for Ukraine

At the start of 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine and so we pivoted quickly to help launch a series of campaigns across Google, Microsoft, and Meta to help generate fundraising projects.

Revenue in Q1-2 2021 (after ethix had rebuilt and managed the account for about 6 months) was up 308% on that same period in 2020 (before ethix takeover). Not only that, but we were able to increase ROAS by 334% at the same time.

Looking at the following year, Q1-2 2022, we were able to increase revenue and ROAS a further 39% and 32% respectively vs our own performance in 2021.

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Do good, better

Whether you’re a fundraising platform like Crowdfunder - or a charity, sustainable brand, or any other kind of purpose-led organisation - we would love to work with you to boost your impact.

Get in touch below to see if we’d be a good fit.