Track15 Helped Friends of Dallas Animal Services Grow its Audience through Strategic Campaign Planning

SUMMARY

Dallas Animal Services (DAS) has been a well-known city entity for years. In fact, DAS is one of the most recognizable Dallas public services. Despite the recognition and regard for this public service, funding for DAS is beholden to the city budget and has not always received adequate funds. A group of animal lovers found the lack of budget for DAS unacceptable, and took it upon themselves to create a “Friends of” group to raise money for DAS. As a nonprofit, Friends of Dallas Animal Services (FODAS) helped raise money to fill in the funding gaps left by the city budget.

As a new nonprofit organization, the Friends of Dallas Animal Services (FODAS) needed to share their message with a wide audience. Unfortunately, they didn’t have an audience to reach. FODAS hired Track15 to create a growth campaign to both generate subscribers and share their compelling story.

Calling All Animal Lovers

The challenges for FODAS were three-fold. First, they needed to tell the story of DAS and FODAS in a compelling way. This required Track15 to conduct many interviews with DAS staff, leadership, and volunteers. Second, we needed to create channels in which to tell those stories. This led us to revamp their existing website, create a Mailchimp and social media accounts for FODAS. With the stories drafted and the channel created we needed to give them an influx of subscribers and audience members.

From Barks to Bucks

Social impressions helped FODAS to gain visibility and guide their audience to a website landing page. All told there were 28,236 impressions across all four ads for their first campaign. Emails were awareness-focused and did not have a call-to-action, so all "clicks" were an added value. Total click-through rate of all emails was 2.9% (1.27% is the industry average). Our first campaign was a warm introduction to future newsletters. The audience has grown by 46% since the campaign ended. After the initial audience growth campaign, Track15 scheduled and implemented a steady drumbeat of communication to keep their newly formed audience engaged with the mission. By their second North Texas Giving Day (2020) FODAS had increased their fundraising by 240% and increased the number of gifts by 40%.