Q2 is the low season for most nonprofit Orgs in the US. It’s the ideal time to allocate a small percentage of your budget and test tactics otherwise deemed too risky well ahead of end-of-year season or any other significant dates.

This year, I’m going knee deep into Digital Out of Home (DOOH). The unsung hero of last year’s media reports, DOOH grew anywhere from 13% to 24% in 2023 – second only to Retail Media Networks. 

DOOH has a few solid reasons going for it, especially in 2024:

• Traditionally a branding play made extremely targetable, DOOH is the closest to so-called “performance branding” advertising, hitting on both objectives if adequately planned and executed. 

• RMNs need to evolve before making themselves a necessary line item of your budget. However, these networks are increasing investments into marketing architecture and digital placements in physical stores are bound to benefit. This will open other verticals besides CPG once they reach critical mass, and THAT will be very relevant to Orgs. I can already picture the “supply clean water” ads next to the soft drinks section in Kroger or “help teach a parent to sew” ads in clothing stores like Patagonia.
  • Testing into DOOH now is building your Org’s ability to leverage the new form of inventory when it becomes available.

• DOOH forces teams – from Fundraising to the Finance department – to operate in the post-cookie world without individual identifiers available. When Google Chrome eventually completes its planned rollout, the ability to “map” target donor audiences against a publisher’s audience composition and report financials based on cohorts (as discussed in SPN 87) will be vital. And specific ZIP codes or locations are no different than publishers, with well-defined demographic and psychographic profiles. 

• DOOH heavily relies on and immediately highlights effective creative assets. That’s another pillar that will be definitive of success in the post-cookie world, and flexing those muscles is always a good idea – forcing us to innovate and try new messaging. 

• An Election Year call-out – DOOH will be less impacted by the media cost increases than most other channels. Thanks to its local nature, only a few swing states will likely see heavy investments, with the rest of the political ad dollars going to broader-reach channels such as Social. 

How to Target? 

Whatever the budget, launching a DOOH campaign starts with a deep dive into the existing donor data. 

• Looking at the US map at a State level in Google Analytics is unlikely to help, even if it’s sorted by the number of donations or donated dollars. That data is too broad and will skew towards the highest-population states for almost every Org. Normalizing the bias by the number of donors relative to the state population doesn’t help much either since you’re simply switching the bias to income instead of population.
  • Instead start from the City dimension and work your way down to individual boroughs, neighborhoods, and ZIP codes while looking at the number of donors relative to the population of a selected area. Depending on the budget available, don’t go lower than 1% or higher than 5% of the total count of ZIP code rows – not donors.  

• Once those target ZIP codes are identified, the trick is to use them to identify any other areas where the target population is possibly present but hasn’t been exposed to your Org enough yet. Depending on the data sources your Org has already adopted, affordable ones such as Census or paid data providers like Experian or Visa all have ZIP code-level data.
  • By closely studying every descriptor, anecdotes will present themselves in dimensions outside of standard Household Income or Number of Children – usually in categories of Brand Preferences (Which grocery stores are most visited in the area? Which car brands are purchased the most?) or Business Data (which company offices are present in the area?). Data Analysts have spent hours, dollars, and server hours calculating this stuff – it’s a goldmine, use their work!

• Once identified, use these anecdotes to create a simple similarity score in Excel to identify other ZIP codes that look like a fit but don’t stand out in your CRM. Don’t choose too many – aim to have twice as many ZIP codes with existing donors as the expansion ones. 

Also, if you’re partnering with a media agency for your campaign executions by all means outsource this work to them but stay an active participant in the process. You want to activate those donor insights that are applicable far beyond the DOOH activation soonest. Don’t sit on them. 

How to Buy? 

Since DOOH became widely available programmatically, this question is much easier than in the days of direct contracts with billboard owners. Every major Ad Buying platform has access to most of the DOOH inventory (I covered several specialized companies more extensively in SPN 26). You need to identify the tech most suitable for the task and the two key constraints to address should be: 

• Structure the campaigns to differentiate between the ZIP codes with a high share of donors already present versus your expansion opportunities, that way you’ve got a head to head look into the Branding vs. Performance power of DOOH for your Org. 

• Given a limited budget allocated to the test, work with a partner to prioritize and source only the DOOH locations close to points of attraction within the identified target areas – grocery stores, busy commuter intersections etc. Doing this will also address any varying population density question. 

Creative 

The make-or-break of every DOOH execution. Creative has got to stand out. Even better if it stops people in their tracks. Here are 3 examples I find myself sharing most often:

• “Pregnant Then Screwed” launched a crying billboard where they played the sound of a baby crying, in an effort to highlight rising child care costs.
• Uber Eats showed the restaurants within delivery range from the actual DOOH ad location. While they pulled it off at a nationwide scale, “localizing” the campaign is a good choice for only several locations selected. 
• “The British Journal of Photography” showed nothing but portraits. A tactic already employed by multiple nonprofit Orgs, showing pictures of people impacted by the Org rarely fails to deliver. 

Regardless of the creative route taken, include a QR code – one of the few delights of the COVID era – to collect immediate donations and tap into the Performance nature of DOOH. 

What to Measure? 

Finally – obviously keep track of any immediate donations driven by the QR code but really study the increase in donations from targeted ZIP codes over a 4-6 month period, so the period after the DOOH campaign has wrapped. Launching (and concluding) the campaign in Q2 allows you to include DOOH in the end-of-year fundraising plans if it delivers.