Food Banks Mississauga: Giving Tuesday, Holiday and End-of-Year 2025 Campaign

Project Overview

1. 01.

   Challenge

   Food Banks Mississauga had run small end-of-year digital campaigns in previous years, but without a coordinated agency strategy or meaningful paid media investment behind them. The question going in was straightforward: could a structured, multi-channel program meaningfully grow donor acquisition and online revenue during the critical giving season?

   With no prior benchmark for agency-run performance, this engagement also had to establish what digital could do for the organisation — not just in this campaign, but as a signal for how to invest in future years.

2. 02.

   Solution

   We designed and managed a three-phase campaign across Meta, Google Search, Microsoft Ads, and Google Performance Max, running from Giving Tuesday through the year-end tax deadline. Total paid media investment was split 62% TOFU prospecting and 38% BOFU retargeting.

   Each phase had a distinct job. The Holiday phase was about seeding new audiences and building the remarketing pool, with no match offer. Giving Tuesday was the high-volume push, with a 2x match offer at the highest spend of any Meta phase (47% of total Meta budget). The Year End phase was urgency-led, concentrating conversion pressure in the final days of the tax year: “Donate by December 31, Your Gift Matched.”

   One of the stronger strategic calls was the development of Mississauga-specific TOFU audience segments on Meta, rather than defaulting to broad national equivalents. Segments like Social Causes Mississauga and Meal Prep Mississauga consistently outperformed broad audiences by 3 to 8 times. Local audiences, it turned out, were doing most of the work.

   We also provided creative direction to the client’s in-house team, informing a shift from photo ads to graphic statics and refining match language from “Double Your Impact” to “MATCHED” and “2X Impact.” The creative difference mattered: graphic static ads outperformed photo ads on the same headline by 7.77x vs. 5.12x ROAS.

3. 03.

   Results

   Every KPI significantly exceeded on a first-ever coordinated campaign.

   The Year End phase was the most efficient: 12.35x ROAS on just 15% of Meta spend. The campaign’s top-performing ad (Year End Phase 2, urgency plus match plus stopwatch visual) returned 14.15x ROAS.

   Google Search was the channel leader overall at 10.10x ROAS. Branded exact-match keywords returned 11 to 14x ROAS. The non-branded keyword “donate to food bank” delivered 3.5x ROAS, confirming that paid search can pull in donors who don’t yet know the organisation by name. A geographic insight also surfaced: “food banks etobicoke” returned 11x ROAS, pointing to an adjacent market worth testing.

   Microsoft Ads delivered the lowest CPA of any channel at $20.87. Branded Microsoft terms returned between 21x and 84x ROAS.

   Paid media directly attributed 39% of total campaign donations. The remaining 61% came through organic, email, direct, and referral channels — most of them influenced by the paid media program running alongside them.