Hospital Foundation Sees 6,200% RoAS on Donor Campaign

Strategus successfully helped the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center Foundation execute a compliant, highly-targeted donor acquisition campaign. Over the 9-week campaign, a full-funnel digital strategy was deployed as the core tactic and to support integrated direct mail, email drops, paid meta, google search, the hospital saw a roughly 6,200% return on ad spend (RoAS) with groundbreaking donations.

Strategus successfully helped the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center Foundation execute a compliant, highly-targeted donor acquisition campaign. Over the 9-week campaign, a full-funnel digital strategy was deployed as the core tactic and to support integrated direct mail, email drops, paid meta, google search, the hospital saw a roughly 6,200% return on ad spend (RoAS) with groundbreaking donations.

This campaign ran over 9 weeks, prioritizing first-party data that has been collected and optimized over the past few years. The root audience is based on third-party data segments for users interested in charitable activities, past donors, and more. Strategus nurtured this audience over several campaigns with different messaging, creating a highly targeted user pool of prior donors. The use of first-party data also enabled precise targeting without compromising donor privacy, reflecting a best-practice approach for healthcare-affiliated clients.

A full-funnel targeting strategy was employed to balance brand awareness with CTV ads and expand reach with deep engagement and conversion through display and video ads. There was no pixel tracking on the hospital or foundation sites due to HIPAA restraints, which usually limits the attributable data points for healthcare clients. First-party Matchback attribution was used as the core attribution methodology, matching ad exposures to donor activity within the foundation’s CRM while respecting HIPAA law and avoiding patient information.

The campaign spent $56,000 across the 9 campaign weeks and generated $3,246,446.96 in donations. The largest single donation was $1,000,000, indicating extremely accurate audience targeting. By leveraging a multi-channel, full-funnel approach with a highly targeted audience and sound attribution strategy, this campaign demonstrated scalable, data-driven results and reinforced long-term client trust within a typically difficult industry.