The Challenge
Fundraising campaigns often focus on short-term outcomes such as more clicks, views and awareness but Epilepsy Action wanted to increase participation in its fundraising challenges, particularly among runners. While awareness remained important, the real objective was finding people willing to actively support the cause through challenge events and fundraising activity. The team already had a compelling creative asset; a powerful video that compared the physical demands of running a marathon with the impact seizures can have on the body but the challenge was getting it in front of the right audience.
With Scale, Comes Complexity
Many campaigns rely on broad targeting in the hope that relevance will follow but we took a different approach. Rather than targeting generic charity audiences, we focused on identifying people already demonstrating running behaviours online which made the goal simple: build an audience of people most likely to engage with the content today and support fundraising initiatives tomorrow. Every decision that followed was built around audience relevance rather than audience size.
Our work
The Stats
By combining powerful creative with audience-first targeting, Black Lab helped Epilepsy Action build a community of engaged runners that will continue to support fundraising efforts long after the campaign ended.
Subscribers Generated
Against an original forecast of just 650 subscribers, the campaign delivered more than 8,600 new channel subscribers, creating a highly engaged audience that can be activated for future fundraising initiatives.
Forecast Exceeded
By combining audience insight, Demand Gen and YouTube, the campaign generated more than thirteen times the expected subscriber volume, significantly outperforming projected results.
Estimated ROI
Based on Epilepsy Action’s projections, the campaign is expected to generate a return of approximately ten pounds for every pound invested, before considering the future value of the audience built.
The Results
The campaign exceeded expectations across every key metric. Black Lab helped Epilepsy Action reach almost 700,000 unique users to deliver 1.1 million impressions through a highly targeted Demand Gen and YouTube strategy. In total, the campaign generated more than 8,500 conversions with a video conversion rate of almost 10%. The campaign did more than create a one-off performance spike, it built a long-term audience of engaged runners that Epilepsy Action can continue to activate for future fundraising challenges.
The result was a 56% increase in marathon ballot entrants year-on-year and an estimated 10:1 return on investment.
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"To get a 56% increase on last year's ballot entrants is an incredible achievement. Based on our estimates, we think this campaign will have a 1:10 return on investment, and that's before we extrapolate any value from the new subscribers we now have on our YouTube running channel."
The Solution
Black Lab built a paid media strategy designed around audience relevance, creative strength and long-term value with a campaign that used Demand Gen and YouTube to run three connected campaign types including; reach, designed to maximise visibility among relevant running and fitness audiences, completed views which was focused on meaningful video engagement, ensuring the creative reached people likely to watch and respond and channel subscriptions, built to grow Epilepsy Action’s YouTube running audience and create a retargetable group for future challenge campaigns.
Audience targeting was shaped around real behavioural signals, including running-related online activity, fitness-focused platforms, including users engaging with challenge-based fitness content. By connecting powerful creative with precise audience insight, Black Lab turned a small media budget into a scalable audience-building campaign.
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