Make-A-Wish Canada ran their 2025 holiday season with a new brand position, a broken measurement framework, and a lot riding on whether paid media could do more than convert the donors who already knew them. Total blended ROAS reached 2.64x, up 41% year-over-year. Total donations grew 82%.
Make-A-Wish Canada came into the 2025 holiday season with two problems that couldn’t be solved separately.
The first was a major brand shift. For years, the public had understood Make-A-Wish primarily as an organisation that grants Disney trips. The 2025 campaign launched a new position — wishes as medical necessity, not luxury experience. Paid media had to build understanding and shift perception before it could ask for donations. That’s a different job than running brand keywords and a donate-now button.
The second problem was measurement. The program had been evaluated on last-click attribution, which systematically undervalued anything happening above the bottom of the funnel. Without fixing the measurement framework, there was no way to justify the investment the new brand position required.
We made top-of-funnel investment the primary revenue mechanism, not a line item to justify later. Three channels were new or significantly expanded: Connected TV, Spotify audio, and a structured landing page engagement strategy.
These weren’t awareness plays in isolation. We deployed CTV and Spotify against remarketing audiences — people who had already engaged with Make-A-Wish paid media, the website, or organic social — to reinforce the “Wishes Are Medicine” message at high frequency before asking for anything. That warmed audience was then funnelled into a connected Meta and Google campaign structure, where messaging, CTAs, and landing experiences were calibrated to where each person sat in their decision to give.
On Meta, top-of-funnel audiences saw “Learn More” CTAs. High-intent remarketing segments saw “Donate Now.” On Google, we scaled non-branded keyword investment significantly, capturing donors who didn’t yet know Make-A-Wish by name but were actively searching for causes to support.
We also moved away from last-click attribution to a blended measurement approach, so the full funnel could be evaluated honestly. Giving Tuesday was identified as the campaign’s highest-leverage moment, with match multipliers scaling to 4x.
Every major channel improved year-over-year.
The shift to top-of-funnel investment didn’t come at the expense of bottom-of-funnel efficiency. It improved it. Non-branded keywords, previously a small part of the search program, were scaled 409% and contributed 47% of total search revenue at a 4.70x ROAS. The Spotify campaign, treated as an experiment, returned 14.2x ROAS against remarketing audiences. The 15-second audio creative alone achieved a 3,067% ROAS.
The measurement change mattered too. Organic search revenue grew 11.76% year-over-year, consistent with the halo effect of upper-funnel investment that last-click attribution would have missed entirely.
