Regardless of the period or what’s in the news, there are constantly people seeking medical resources. Yet nonprofits that give those sources obtain a lot of their contributions during moments of boosted public attention like natural disasters.

As soon as the public focus wanes, stated Tony Morain, VP of communications at humanitarian aid company Straight Alleviation, “so does rate of interest in what we’re doing.”

Straight Alleviation particularly concentrates on bringing medical help, consisting of physicians, centers and medicine, to individuals and communities dealing with destitution. The company has actually made an online reputation for being “highly reliable,” according to Morain, but part of that efficacy originates from putting very little invest toward marketing and raising understanding.

Staying top of mind year-round for target markets who are inclined to make charitable payments is an ongoing challenge for Direct Relief. Yet a current campaign it ran in collaboration with end-to-end programmatic platform Nexxen proved that the company might raise its advertising performance by targeting– and retargeting– most likely benefactors, along with past benefactors, even when there are no significant calamities in the headings.

In late 2025, Direct Relief released a project to bring even more understanding to its objectives, particularly within the L.A. market, and to advise individuals that clinical help is always a necessity. The target markets Nexxen built specifically for the campaign utilizing first-party information surpassed the off-the-shelf third-party target markets available in Nexxen’s DSP. And it provided Straight Relief a new design for even more regular fundraising throughout the whole calendar year.

High-value audiences

Yet before Straight Alleviation might create this new marketing model, it required some aid identifying the untapped sources it contended its disposal, rather than waiting to take advantage of uncertain information protection.

Direct Relief contracted independent ad agency Kindling Media to guide the project. Kindling’s owner and CEO, Jennifer Ziman, had actually formerly dealt with Straight Alleviation on a pro-bono campaign in 2022 that promoted the team’s relief efforts for the battle in Ukraine.

Kindling Media chose Nexxen as its technology partner because of its targeting capacities and the truth that a brand lift research was included as part of the project proposal.

The project ranged from mid-November with the end of January, which is an important stretch of time for nonprofits, Ziman claimed, thanks to Offering Tuesday and year-end tax obligations, which typically have a major impact on donations.

Nevertheless, the holiday can be a double-edged sword for nonprofits looking for donations, said Oscar Rondon, Nexxen’s VP of information and measurement solutions. Yes, customers remain in even more of a “providing frame of mind,” he claimed, but they’re likewise fretted about holidays and present acquiring, and are commonly “seeing their spending plans.”

The natural starting factor, after that, was looking for target markets who had actually already shared rate of interest in Straight Alleviation’s mission or given away to the org in the past.

Nevertheless, Straight Relief’s very own first-party information can only get so near to those previous benefactors. Its dataset provided zip codes and geographic areas in L.A. associated with past contributions, yet couldn’t target at the individual level, stated Morain.

Right on target

Dealing with Nexxen gave Direct Relief access to more granular audience targeting.

The project targeted preexisting audiences from third-party suppliers like TransUnion and Comscore that are offered via Nexxen’s DSP, as well as custom-made target markets built on a mix of Nexxen’s and Straight Relief’s first-party information.

Nexxen curated audience sectors based on Straight Alleviation’s postal code information. It then matched that data against its own ID graph, called Nexxen Discovery, to retarget Direct Alleviation’s previous donors at the specific level. It likewise sought new donors by target market that read posts about the impact of charitable donations or accessing internet sites of similar organizations, like the Red Cross.

Nexxen placed its pixel on all of the campaign’s CTV advertisements and on the Direct Alleviation site so it was able to retarget people who were subjected to the ads across social networks. It was essential for Direct Relief to strike what Morain called the “Goldilocks number of impressions”– simply enough that individuals remembered them, but not numerous that their target market ended up being fatigued.

The happy medium, Rondon reported, was about 4 impacts.

The campaign at first targeted participants of higher-income families that mored than 35 as a proxy for high lifetime value, Kindling Media’s Ziman added. Yet as the project took place, Kindling fine-tuned it to concentrate a lot more on females, who were reacting in majorities to a PSA from comic and starlet Jane Lynch that was an early component of the campaign.

Including a famous comedian in its ads was also a separation from Straight Relief’s previous advertising and marketing initiatives, said Morain, and the innovative adjustment seemed to resonate with target markets in a way that disaster-focused campaigns did not.

“You most likely to our homepage,” he claimed, “it’s Ebola, cyclones, wildfires. We’re not that funny.”

Much of the campaign concentrated on CTV, Ziman claimed, and done specifically well on Peacock. Yet one of the biggest takeaways was about the target market, as opposed to the network.

Nexxen’s target market segments drove 1, 453 site visitors to Direct Alleviation’s website, exceeding the third-party target markets, which drove 1, 236

Nexxen’s Rondon liquid chalked up the comparative success of the business’s very own audience sections to having “fresher information” than the third-party target markets.

Third-party information collections are commonly “dated,” Rondon claimed, and aren’t getting a constant supply of the latest data. Nexxen, on the other hand, stands up to two or 3 terabytes of target market consumption information every day, he claimed.

By the end of the campaign, Direct Alleviation saw a 9 4 % boost in donors and a 7 9 % boost in income development from the previous year.

The project was “a truly example of what’s possible,” claimed Rondon, when the “pipes is right.”