The Project

Cancer Support UK is on a mission to ensure one of its free Kids' Kits is available to each and every one of the 1,900 children sadly diagnosed with cancer every year.

The kits are supplied in a long-lasting canvas tote bag and contain a mixture of practical items along with fun puzzles, toys, and a comforting, lavender-scented Warmies®️ soft toy.

Children love them, and their families all speak highly of them - there is no shortage of positive feedback from parents who all say how the Kids' Kits received by their sick children helped to distract them from their experience, bringing little moments of joy.

The charity receives no government funding and relies on grants along with donations from the general public to deliver its work.

Over the years it has run online fundraisers promoted with Facebook ads in order to solicit donations, with campaigns at Easter and Christmas.

This year it turned to Fifty2M for this. Since September 2023, we've been managing its search engine ads via Google Ad Grants, and Facebook ads to promote its Cancer Coach service and, more recently, its fortnightly Focus Forwards drop-in sessions on Zoom.

We were tasked with not only generating donations, but also widening the gap between advertising spend and gifts secured.

What We Did

We started with a detailed review of past performance, mining the data in Facebook Ads Manager accumulated from the 2024 iteration of the Easter campaign.

This helped us understand the messaging and creative that had worked well previously, and the audience profile of those who donated, as well as providing insights into overall campaign architecture.

It gave us some broad ideas for how we could improve and enhance previous efforts, and established a baseline cost per donation and average donation value that we could use to measure success against.

Taking what we learned, we built our campaign.

Audience targeting
When it came to finding the right audience, we departed from previous campaigns and, instead, focused on parents and grandparents in the expectation that our messaging would better resonate.

Warming people up first
Previously, the campaign had been built with the Sales objective, optimised for donations. Whilst this had been successful, its an approach that can be costly because it leads to ads being put in front of cold audiences with little to no brand awareness or cause affinity.

To address this, we started with a 'runway' campaign, showing ads to our target audience that were designed to expose people to the Cancer Support UK brand, and also introduce some context around the incidence of childhood cancer.

We then launched our Sales campaign optimised for donations, and made sure that we retargeted those who had previously engaged with our warm-up ads, as well as fresh Facebook and Instagram users that fit our profile.

Landing page v website
Unlike in the past, where ad traffic had been sent to the client's main website, we opted to build a single long-form landing page hosted at a subdomain. The rationale for this was simple: evidence suggests that landing pages optimised for conversions do a better job than websites when it comes to driving visitor action, largely because there are fewer distractions and because the entire page is focused on a single objective (in this instance, getting people to donate).

The landing page told the story of Archie who was diagnosed with cancer aged just four, and who has since spent years in and out of hospital receiving treatment, and was structured in a manner designed to invite the visitor to keep reading.

Marketing psychology
We employed several tactics from our ecommerce playbook, borrowing from what we know about pricing psychology and using it to try and increase the value of donations.
This same thinking extended to our ads too, where we trialled several headline versions designed specifically to 'prime' audiences for increased generosity.

Knowing that people have a tendency to make decisions based on emotion that they then seek to rationalise with logic, we used ad copy and creative designed specifically to elicit an emotional reaction, mixing in other ads that were designed to promote the kits and their contents, along with others intended to show the scale of childhood cancer and provide extra context for the campaign.

What We Achieved

The campaign was hugely successful on every measure.

The combination of a dedicated landing page optimised for donations, campaign structure (including the use of warm-up ads first), and heavy use of marketing psychology all played a part in attracting donors whilst driving down advertising costs and nudging-up average donation values.

Reach
The initial runway campaign was created using the Reservation buying method, rather than the more traditional Auction method, enabling us to guarantee how many Facebook and Instagram user accounts our ads would be served to. We constructed this to reach 500,000 people. The Sales campaign subsequently reached 314,000 people, with a good degree of cross-over. This is around a third of the total audience reached by the 2024 Sales campaign.

Landing page engagement
Time on page averaged a whopping 2 minutes 36 seconds, indicating high levels of engagement, with 12% of visitors reaching a scroll depth of 90%.

Page visits
The landing page saw more 3,400 visits, with each user viewing it 1.66 times on average, again demonstrating high levels of interest and engagement.

Advertising spend
Overall campaign ad spend in 2025 was equal to 34% of 2024 spend, with a 45% reduction in cost per donation, whilst achieving a greater overall value of donations.

Results
The average donation value increased by 46% compared to 2024. This, coupled with the reduced ad spend, resulted in a Return On Advertising Spend (ROAS) of 294% (£2.94 collected in donations for every £1 spent on ads), and significantly boosted net income generation. The conversion rate averaged 10% from early on in the campaign, compared to 3.4% in 2024 - a gain we attribute to the use of a discrete landing page rather than trying to secure donations on the main website, along with our persuasive copy and creative.

What The Client Says

Reflecting on the importance of the Easter fundraising campaign, and what we helped to achieve, Mark Guymer, CEO at Cancer Support UK, says:

"Sadly, childhood cancer is on the increase with around 1,900 new cases diagnosed every year in the UK. That's roughly five families a day having their lives turned upside down.

"Those children all end up spending long periods in hospital, surrounded by beeping machines and faces they don't know, as they undergo treatment - far from home, feeling unwell, and missing out on the simple joys of childhood.

"At Cancer Support UK, we believe that no child should have to face cancer alone. That’s why we’re on a mission to ensure every child undergoing treatment is able to receive a free Kids’ Cancer Kit – a small but powerful package filled with comfort, distraction, and a little bit of joy during a difficult time.

"It's more than just a bag of items. It’s a lifeline of comfort in a world that feels scary and uncertain.

"Funding these kits is a challenge when you rely on public generosity, and it means constantly finding new and better ways to attract and connect with donors. We've enjoyed a good level of success with digital fundraising campaigns on Facebook and Instagram in the past, but wanted to see if we could improve our results this year.

"Thanks to our work together over the last 18 months in other areas of our marketing, Fifty2M have a really good understanding of what we're all about and our audiences, and we've seen what they're capable of when it comes to the technical aspects of digital marketing but also the creative and behavioural side of things too, and so it made sense to extend their role in support of our fundraising.

"Their suggestions for how to get improved results from this year's Easter campaign played out incredibly well, and we're really pleased with what they achieved for us.

"Fifty2M take a very commercial approach, and really understood the need to focus on net income generation so that the money raised covered the cost of procuring donations whilst also leaving a meaningful surplus we could use to fill and send kits to hospitals across the UK.

"The results of the campaign speak for themselves."