Big Give: Christmas Challenge

Growing one of the UK's biggest matched fundraising campaigns through paid advertising

Services

For the Big Give Christmas Challenge 2025, I developed and managed the paid advertising strategy across Meta to help maximise awareness, drive high-quality traffic to the campaign website and support donations during one of the UK's largest matched fundraising campaigns.

Building on previous years, I introduced a new two-phase campaign strategy designed to warm audiences before the donation window opened, helping improve campaign performance and maximise the impact of the advertising budget.

1.4M+

16k+

4.15%

270k

160%

Impressions

Website clicks

Click through rate

Pre launch engagements

Increase in conversion rate YOY

The Challenge

The Christmas Challenge is a fast-paced national fundraising campaign with a limited window to encourage people to donate.

Like many charity campaigns, there were technical limitations. Without Meta's conversion tracking pixel, the platform couldn't optimise directly for completed donations. The challenge was to generate as much high-quality traffic as possible while ensuring audiences were primed to take action once the campaign opened.

My Approach

I introduced a new two-stage paid advertising strategy that focused on building awareness before switching to donation-focused activity once the campaign launched.

The first phase was designed to increase familiarity with the Christmas Challenge through engaging video content, creating warm audiences that could be retargeted during the main fundraising campaign.

During the live campaign, I managed audience targeting, campaign optimisation and creative performance to maximise website visits and ensure advertising spend was focused on the strongest-performing content throughout the campaign.

An image of two children placing ornaments on a christmas tree. They are looking up at it, and one is helping the other.

Two people sit facing a christmas tree. There have their arms around eachother and the tree is lit up. They are wearing santa hats.

The Impact

The new campaign approach delivered a significant improvement in performance compared with previous years, generating high-quality website traffic while improving overall efficiency.

Highlights included:

Reaching more than 1.4 million people across the campaign.
Driving over 16,000 website clicks during the donation period.
Achieving a 4.15% click-through rate - well above typical charity advertising benchmarks.
Delivering website traffic at a significantly lower cost than previous campaigns.
Building an engaged audience of more than 270,000 interactions during the pre-launch awareness campaign, helping generate momentum ahead of launch.

The campaign demonstrated the value of combining audience warming with ongoing optimisation to improve fundraising performance, even when direct conversion optimisation isn't possible.