BACKGROUND

The Baptist Foundation of Oklahoma (BFO) and their mission to inspire generosity and goodwill has motivated many families, churches and ministries to support a variety of charitable causes. However, together, BFO and VI felt there was an opportunity to broaden their mission across an even larger audience. Specifically, millennials.

To help motivate younger individuals to participate in charitable giving, we created a mobile app, which we named and branded “MustardSeed.” The app has a simple round-up premise – each time you make a purchase with the debit or credit card linked to your MustardSeed account, the purchase amount is rounded to the nearest dollar. Those few extra cents are donated to the church or charity of your choice. MustardSeed makes charitable giving effortless.

We branded, developed and prepared to launch the app, but that wasn’t enough. Millennials can’t use MustardSeed if they don’t know it exists.

OBJECTIVES

The objectives of the MustardSeed campaign were to:

• Increase awareness of the MustardSeed app.
• Educate millennials about how the app works.
• Generate app downloads.

In order to measure our success in achieving these objectives, we monitored user acquisition and donations, and also set goals for the below KPIs: Obtain a 15% video view rate on our MustardSeed pre-roll ad (a 30-second video that explains the app).

• Obtain 650 click-to-install app conversions from the pre-roll ad.
• Obtain a click-through rate of 2.00% on our paid search ads.
• Obtain a 10% video completion rate on Facebook, meaning users watched one-third of the video on average.
• Obtain 650 click-to-install app conversions from the video ad on Facebook.

STRATEGY

Our strategy was to generate demand for the MustardSeed app by showing how easy it is to use and the impact it can make on charities.

TACTICS

We created an interactive marketing campaign using pre-roll ads, paid search and video ads. To accompany this interactive campaign, we created a marketing website that housed all of the information about the app and how it works. The site also included a minute-long video that explained the benefits of MustardSeed. This video was condensed into a 30-second version that we used in our digital ads. Pixels were placed on the website and within the MustardSeed app to ensure proper tracking.

TrueView Ads
We ran TrueView pre-roll ads to generate awareness of MustardSeed, targeting Southern Baptists and other evangelically minded millennials in the state of Oklahoma. The call-to-action for the ads was a click-to-install, which displayed the app name, icon and app ratings underneath the video.

Paid Search
Paid search ads allowed the user to open the app in the Apple App Store directly from the ad. We targeted people who were searching for ways to give to a Baptist charity or who were looking for a charity app.

Facebook Video Ads
Our video ads on Facebook also contained a call-to-action to install MustardSeed. We targeted people interested in charities available on MustardSeed across the country, as well as Southern Baptists and other evangelically minded millennials.

RESULTS

Overall, the campaign was a huge success. In less than 6 months after its launch, the MustardSeed app acquired hundreds of users, with thousands of dollars donated to charity across the nation. We exceeded all of our KPI goals:

• Our pre-roll ad yielded a video view rate of 20.75%. That’s 138% of our goal.
• There were 697 click-to-install app conversions from the pre-roll ad. That’s 107% of our objective.
• Our paid search ads yielded a click-through rate of 3.20%. That’s 160% of our objective.
• Our video completion rate on Facebook was 15%. That’s 150% of our goal.
• There were 1,079 click-to-install app conversions from the Facebook ad. That’s 166% of our objective.