At Deerfield Academy, we run a single Facebook page that appeals to many different groups—alumni, parents, students, grandparents, friends, and prospective students.
Now, with EverTrue’s GivingTree, we have the opportunity to use Facebook engagement data to better understand our constituent base. We want to make sure that as many Deerfield community members as possible are seeing and “liking” the content on our page, so I decided to run a quick experiment to grow our audience. Here’s how I did it:
1. In GivingTree, I ran a search of all constituents who had never engaged with our Facebook page.
2. I exported the search results into a CSV file. (In the export, I stripped out all fields except for email addresses.)
3. I opened up the Facebook ads manager and uploaded the CSV as a “Customer List” to create a custom audience.
4. I went to Facebook’s ad create tool. First, I selected “Promote your Page” as the campaign objective.
5. Lastly, I selected my custom audience, set a budget, and customized the ad using the cover photo of our page (a photo of campus).
The campaign resulted in 1,000 new likes for our page—a huge success! I’m a strong believer that, while you can always run an ad to a general audience and get thousands of likes that way, it’s more meaningful to bring in likes from a relevant and interested audience. GivingTree allowed us to run a more targeted ad and, in turn, engage more Deerfield alumni and constituents with our content.
Planning an alumni event? GivingTree can help with that too! Check out this video tutorial.
Danaë DiNicola is the electronic communications specialist at Deerfield Academy.