UJA Federation of New York: Paid Media

Raising $2M+ through an integrated media strategy

The UJA Federation of New York (UJA) serves the Jewish community of New York and supports Jews throughout the world, responding to crises both here and abroad. During Q4 2023, we partnered with UJA, joining up their display, paid social and SEM activity to raise awareness, nurture consideration and convert. Through End of Year campaigning, Giving Tuesday activation and Rapid Response, we raised over $2 million.

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Challenge

Historically, UJA’s top and lower funnel campaigns were disconnected — leading to fragmented approaches to campaigning and measurement. Attribution was largely being viewed through a last-click model, which did not take into account the interconnected role of awareness.

Solution

We worked closely with UJA to ensure their middle of the funnel was working hard, nurturing people from the point of awareness to conversion, all the while increasing the ceiling of opportunity and growth hacking — and helping the team define a more advanced view of attribution through multifaceted analysis.

The Strategic Approach

We knew that it takes the average user eight touchpoints before they convert, and that a more sophisticated approach to campaigning and measurement was required to truly unlock the potential of multichannel activation. We joined-up their Display advertising with lower-funnel activation strategies, taking an holistic approach to media planning: scaling Paid Social and SEM in line with sophisticated awareness campaigns to turn consideration into conversion, all the while ensuring advanced remarketing and engagement tactics were being deployed to nurture users through the funnel.

Activities we deployed through Q4 included:

Awareness Activity

We secured high-profile placement via the The New York Times during one of the busiest times of the year, including site-wide banner placement, Section Front advertising and eNewsletter placement. This was accompanied by precision targeting using lookalikes, interest models and third party data sources such as voter profiles.

Nurturing

We recommended UJA launch a Lead Generation campaign during December to engage audiences with a non-financial ask after Giving Tuesday and to capture data that can be nurtured across owned channels (eg. email) and remarketing. Site-wide retargeting was also run via Programmatic, significantly outperforming benchmarks, securing a CTR of 0.8%, which is far above the 0.22% Display benchmark.

Rapid Response Campaign

We activated rapidly after the October 7 attack, defining a Paid Search strategy that was live within hours of the event and closely followed by multi-channel activation across Paid Social and Display. In the first week alone, more than $800,000 was raised, heavily influenced by being quick to market.

Giving Tuesday Campaigning

Our joined-up approach to media doubled UJA’s level of conversion in 2023 versus 2022 Giving Tuesday campaigning, assisted by prominent Display placement and data-driven conversion tactics.

End of Year Campaigning

Multichannel campaigns included a direct buy within The New York Times’ eNewsletter.

Throughout, we increased the ceiling of opportunity through utilizing Google and Bing’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology through advanced Phrase and Broad SEM campaigns: with non-brand search terms achieving highly-ROI positive outcomes. We knew ongoing measurement was critical, and defined a multifaceted view of attribution that considered varying models including last-click, data-driven and mixed media models.

+206%

Increase in Giving Tuesday conversions compared to 2022

Creative

We acted as an extension of UJA’s creative team, providing ongoing creative direction, and responding to data-driven insight. We encouraged varying A/B tests across channels to enable multivariate testing, optimizing on an ongoing basis toward the best performing creative routes at an audience level.