Facebook gave us the first hit free: get your constituents to like your page and you’ll be able to talk with them on their platform free.  What they meant was “get your constituents to append their own interest data to Facebook’s copious data stores and Facebook will sell it to others.”

It doesn’t matter anymore: the hook is set.  There is (almost) no organic reach anymore.  They own your fans.  And they are offering a hit of the good new stuff, the blue stuff, with fee-free donations.

I know.  I sound like a Facebook skeptic.  But Google and Facebook own 186% of the growth in online advertising.  That sounds like the innumerate football coach encouraging their players to give 110%, but it’s really.  It means that all the growth that ads are experiencing is covered by Google and Facebook… plus 86%.  Everyone else is shrinking.

So, for the near term at least, there are three major players in the online advertising realm: Google, Facebook, and Hope.  Hope that the telegraph makes a comeback.  Or Yahoo!, which is equally likely.

This can be scary, because Facebook is large and you, relatively speaking, are not.  You, for example, could not swing a US presidential election by trying, much less by accident.  Your budget will be a rounding error on the rounding error of Facebook’s rounding errors.

But you can still make Facebook work for you by knowing your donors’ identity or identities.

In brief: when you know your donor’s identity and play it back to them, even in simple examples like cat versus dog, you can increase conversion by 15% and average gift by 15%.  Plus, donor identities are highly predictive of future giving.

Why does this matter for Facebook?  Because identities can help you create an inexpensive Facebook campaign that expands only when it proves itself.

Let’s say you have one donor identity that’s worth more than your others.  (You can brainstorm and see examples of donor identities here).  How do you use Facebook to get more of that type of donor?

Start with Facebook Custom Audiences.  You upload a list of your donors (and/or constituents) with that identity.  You can then market to that list with advertisements targeted to that particular identity – no more monolithic message to the masses.

This is a good way of getting additional donations from your current donors (hint: run people who have donated recently as a suppression file or as an audience to upgrade to monthly giving).

You can also use this as a conversion audience – if you have event attendees who fit your valuable donor identity but haven’t yet donated directly, you can advertise to them.  We’ve also seen examples where targeting a custom audience who are receiving a mail or email solicitation can lift the response rate to that more traditional communication.

Depending on your identity, you’ll then want to expand to lookalike audiences.  This takes that custom audience you created and tries to find people who are as close to that as possible.

I say “depending on your identity”  because there are some things that Facebook doesn’t know.  If you have a donor identity of “parent” or “cat people” or “medical professional,” it will be very precise.  But if your donor identity is “prostate cancer sufferers” or “parents who involve their kids in their philanthropy” or “crime victims”, Facebook modeling won’t be able to find these in a reliable manner.

Then, there’s retargeting.  This involves putting a pixel on your website and marketing to those who went to that part of your site.  The trick to using this to target an identity is to target only on specific parts of your website.  It’s a dirty non-secret: not everyone who comes to your site is valuable.  You want to avoid the kid to comes to your site looking for information for their book report, for example.

So, if your most valuable donors are those who have the disease your organization works on, having the pixel as part of the patient resource section will give you the best prospects.  You can also use this to try to convert people to donors after they have interacted with particular content (e.g., an advocacy alert).

You can also target interests and behaviors. I recently did this for a nonprofit that has just started up.  They had no donor file and no web traffic, so everything above was moot.  We were targeting people who were interested in policy debate (the organization funds debate programs after funds have been cut), so we asked Facebook for the intersection of people who give charitable donations and those who are interested in policy debate.  Ads have been running for a couple months with a grand total of $3.67 spent to prove out the concept.

(BTW, if you do want to support high school policy debate, it’s called the Sharko Foundation and we’d appreciate your support here).

This is only possible, however, if you know your donor.  Wading into Facebook in an attempt to advertise to people who want to do good things is like trying to boil the ocean.  And may the powers that be have mercy on your soul if you try to attack it with just demographics variables and a dream.  But if you start with a strong knowledge of your donor and his/her identity, you can make Facebook work for you.

PS. We are currently running a very interesting Facebook identity test.  If we have significant results by April 4th for our free identity-based segmentation webinar, we’ll share them there.  (If not, it still will be a good webinar; hope to see you there!)

Nick