Day 17: Finding High Quality Contacts with Meta Ads
If you know me, you know I'm an expert on all things organic growth, but when it comes to paid ads—I always go to Caroline Griffin.
Today she's going to walk you through how to set up and run Meta ads to one of the resources we've talked about over the last 17 days including:
A freebie
A Spotify playlist
A quiz
A petition
Your general newsletter opt-in
….and more.
Here's how to do it.
🛠️ How to set up your Meta ads
Step 1: Pull a list of your donors; ideally a list of at least 500 people. If you have a large enough list to get more specific, let's focus on active monthly donors + one time donors in the last two years.
Step 2: Use that list to create a Custom Audience in your Meta Business Manager, then create a 1% Lookalike audience in your target country (or countries) based on that list. When you set up your ads, select this Lookalike audience and keep Advantage+ turned ON. This tells Meta to find more people like your donors.
When you set up your audience targeting, you may also want to export your full email list and EXCLUDE this audience so they don't see the ads. And you may want to add more layers to your targeting, like narrowing the age range or focusing on just Men or Women, or just certain zip codes, based on your cause and donor base.
Step 3: Create a sign-up landing page with a compelling reason to sign up, aligned with your prospective donors' needs and values. Maybe it's a lead magnet that solves a problem for them, an invitation to a virtual event, or an automated journey they will receive (ex. "Sign up for 10 easy sustainability tips to make your daily life greener, delivered in bite-sized emails," or "Want to understand what 'carbon neutral' actually means? Sign up for a 7-day explainer series!").
For some organizations, especially if your work is tied to current political or social events, encouraging people to sign up for regular updates and opportunities to take action might be enough. You can use the Meta Event Setup tool to set up simple conversion tracking (no coding required), to tell Meta that a certain button click or landing on a confirmation page signals a new Lead.
Step 4: Run a Meta Ad with a daily budget of at least $20, using the Leads objective, pointing your new Lookalike audience to your new landing page.
Your ad creative can be a 15-30 second vertical video of yourself or someone on your team, a photo, a graphic, a GIF, or—always best—you can test multiple! The most important thing is to open your ad copy with a hook that attracts the *right* people to your cause. If you know you want more moms in their 30s to become donors, your copy should look quite different than if you're aiming to grow your list with college students or retirees.
Step 5: Watch and learn! After a couple of days of running the campaign, you want to see an average cost per lead of $3.50 or lower (to meet or beat the M+R 2025 benchmark). The cheaper the better is not always true on Meta; you want to attract the RIGHT new contacts, not the people on Facebook who sign up for everything they see!
💡 Why it works
Meta continues to be one of the most affordable ways to grow a nonprofit's list, and because you can run both Facebook and Instagram ads from the same platform—across Newsfeeds, Stories, Reels, Threads, and more—there are endless options to customize and reach people most likely to become engaged supporters and donors.
📊 Results
Most of Caroline's lead generation clients are bringing in new contacts with Meta Ads for under $2 apiece, some much closer to $1. These contacts are not unsubscribing at a high rate, and clients who tag these contacts in their CRMs can see who becomes a donor, and from what appeal.
Last month, she helped Roots Ethiopia welcome 224 new email contacts using an Ethiopian Cookbook lead magnet for an ad spend of just $278. Those 224 people were immediately entered into an automated welcome journey to introduce them to the organization and deepen the relationship.
🧰 Tools Needed
Meta Ads Manager
The ability to create a landing page, either directly on their website or using a third-party tool like your email service provider
🗣️ Last thought
What I love about Caroline's ad strategy is that if you're an organization that has the ability to put financial resources behind your marketing efforts—Meta ads have proven time and again to really work.
It also one of those strategies that you can set up once, check in on, but mostly let run in the background. Depending on the performance—you can increase or decrease your investment easily.
What do you think? Would your organization give Meta ads a try?
In addition to Meta ads—Caroline is an expert on all things TEXT MESSAGES 📲. I know from personal experience how powerful a text message strategy can be.
If you're interested in adding a text message strategy into your 2026 communication plan—sign up for TEXT FOR GOOD—a 3-part workshop starting in April. You can get $49 off when you use code: ‘JESS49’.