How To Support Your Charity’s Christmas Donations Campaign With Facebook Ads in 2025

TL;DR? How To Improve Your Charity’s Chances of Success With Facebook Ads For Your 2025 Christmas Fundraiser

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It’s been harder to get results with ads on Facebook since the start of 2025 as a result of the way Meta, the platform’s owner, has been responding to regulatory changes. If you’ve seen a decline in performance and are worried it could impact your Christmas fundraising campaign, here’s what you can do.

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• Launch a set of ‘runway’ campaigns as soon as possible (ideally before the end of September)

• Shift the emphasis to activities higher up the marketing funnel, using the awareness, engagement, and leads objectives

• Use these campaigns to drive brand awareness and cause affinity, and to collect the email addresses of people who are the most engaged

• Stay in touch with this newly acquired audience and nurture the people in it with powerful storytelling to strengthen their connection to your charity and its work

• Make email your primary channel for promoting your Christmas fundraising campaign to this engaged and committed audience. Providing you have the correct consent in place, target the people in it with ads on Facebook that you use to ‘nudge’ them into action

• Create a Lookalike audience from your list to help you reach more people with similar characteristics that may also be prepared to support your Christmas campaign

• Don’t rely on bottom-of-funnel donation campaigns that may have proven successful in the past

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What’s Changed And Why Has It Become Harder To Get Results With Facebook Ads?

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EU and UK regulations have placed additional burdens on big tech companies like Meta, Facebook’s owner.

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(For a more detailed explainer, read this blog https://www.fifty2m.com/blog/why-facebook-ads-not-working-privacy-changes)

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In short:

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• Meta is no longer allowed to combine people’s personal information gathered across its multiple platforms in order to build detailed profiles for advertising purposes. This means that it can’t take what it knows about a Facebook user with what it knows about that same user on Instagram

• It now faces stiffer penalties if found to hold any personal information without proper user consent, especially ‘sensitive’ classes of data that confirm or even imply a person’s health or financial status etc

• As a result, audiences have shrunk and Meta has introduced stricter data sharing restrictions and is enforcing GDPR consent via the websites of advertisers much more robustly

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These changes are making it harder to reach the right audiences and to optimise for conversions. If yours is a health charity, it’s likely you’ll experience even more restrictions on the kind of website visitor data you can transmit to Facebook via the Meta Pixel.

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How Can We Improve Our Facebook Ad Results To Boost Our 2025 Christmas Fundraising Campaign?

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Facebook Ads Manager groups campaign objectives according to the different stages of the typical funnel: Awareness (top), Consideration (middle), and Conversion (bottom).

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Traditionally, donation campaigns are run with the Sales objective as part of a bottom-of-funnel Conversion campaign.

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But Conversion campaigns have been the most hit by the changes described above because they result in an intentional exchange of personal information on the websites controlled by advertisers. Meta is especially concerned about the risks of advertisers sharing people’s personal information with it via the Meta Pixel without explicit and informed consent, especially in the case of potentially sensitive categories of data, when conversion events take place. 

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In fact, it’s so worried about this risk, that it now restricts even implied personal information: if your form name is ‘Donate To End Muscular Dystrophy’ Meta’s advanced tools will red flag this as potentially telling it something about the donor’s health - it appears to assume that someone making a donation to such a campaign may either be directly impacted by the condition themselves, or be related to someone who is, and that this is their motivation for giving.

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In light of the above changes, we’re recommending a deliberate shift to campaigns that are higher up the marketing funnel.

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Using Upper Funnel Facebook Ads To Boost Your Charity’s Christmas Fundraising Appeal in 2025 

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In order to avoid the problems we’ve outlined, it’s sensible to place greater emphasis on those upper funnel stages - Awareness and Consideration. Here’s how:

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Run a campaign with the Awareness objective: Start by getting your charity brand in front of your target audience. Try to reach as many people as you can, as often as you can, to increase brand familiarity and get people thinking about your cause

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Run a campaign with the Engagement objective: Use storytelling ads, especially video and carousel formats, that bring your cause to life and encourage people to interact with the ads themselves and to also visit specific pages on your website where you can get into more detail

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Run a campaign with the Leads objective: Use ‘call to action’ ads that encourage people to pledge their support for your cause, but where you make no attempt to solicit donations. The goal is to obtain email addresses, and explicit consent to receiving electronic communications, so that you can build a list of engaged audience members. Add these to automated email marketing campaigns that nurture them in the run up to the launch of your Christmas campaign

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Use your newly acquired email list as your primary channel to promote your Christmas fundraiser: because you can now communicate directly and freely with people in this audience, you are no longer constrained by Meta’s restrictions. And, if you’ve done a good enough job of nurturing people and staying connected, they should be much more amenable to donating when the time is right

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Upload your list to Facebook Ads Manager to create Custom Audiences for targeting: provided you have appropriate consent, upload your leads list back into Facebook Ads Manager, and target members with a bottom-of-funnel donations campaign designed to prompt them into action (just in case they don’t all respond to your email requests). Create a Lookalike audience that you similarly target with donation ads, reaching people with similar characteristics, interests, and behaviours to boost your reach. Provided you don’t convey any potentially sensitive personal information, and can demonstrate consent, Meta should not impose restrictions

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For this to work, it’s important to start as soon as possible and ideally before the end of September 2025 so you have ample time to build your audience.

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💡 Bonus Tip: If you already have a list of donor email addresses with consent, you can use this to create a Lookalike audience for your Awareness campaign, essentially signalling to Meta that you want to reach more people like these. 

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Key Takeaways: Making Effective Use of Facebook Ads To Support Your Charity’s Christmas Fundraiser in 2025

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• Meta’s response to increased EU and UK regulation is making it harder to achieve success with Facebook ads

• If your charity has previously relied on Facebook ads to solicit donations at Christmas, these changes could impact you

• You can increase your chances of success by shifting to campaigns higher up the marketing funnel

• Focus on raising awareness, driving engagement, and obtaining leads that you can then nurture towards making donations to your Christmas campaign later on

• Use the leads list to create Lookalike audiences in Facebook Ads Manager so you can expand your reach

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Want some hands-on help designing, building, and managing campaigns like this to boost your chances? We run paid social campaigns as part of our brand and performance marketing solutions. Get in touch today https://www.fifty2m.com/contact 

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