Solved: Overcomplicated Facebook Ads Campaign for Nonprofit

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Happy to give you some of my thoughts on your campaign planning. It's easy to get tangled up trying to do everything at once, especially with a project you're passionate about. Your instincts to segment your audience are good, but I think we can simplify the approach to make it a lot more powerful and less complicated than you're making it.

The main thing isn't about creating dozens of different ads for every single person you can think of. It's about finding the single, most powerful reason someone signs up, and then building your campaigns around that core motivation. Let's unpack that a bit.

Your ICP is a Nightmare, Not a Demographic

Right, first things first. Let's talk about your targeting. You've mentioned creating separate ads for women, for avid cyclists, for people at a finish line. This is the kind of thinking that leads to wasted ad spend. You're defining your customer by what they *are* (a woman, a cyclist), not by what they *want* or what problem they're trying to solve.

Forget the sterile demographic profile. To stop burning cash, you have to define your potential participant by their specific, urgent 'nightmare'. This sounds dramatic for a charity event, but the principle holds. Their 'nightmare' isn't being a woman; it's the feeling of being stuck in a rut and needing a goal to strive for. It's the desire to join a community of like-minded people. It's the deep need to contribute to a cause that might have personally affected their family.

Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state. Let's map out a few possibilities for your event:

• The "New Year, New Me" Achiever: Their pain is post-holiday sluggishness and a lack of motivation. They need a concrete, challenging goal to structure their year around. Your event is the solution.
• The "Community Seeker": Their pain is isolation or wanting to find their 'tribe'. They crave shared experiences and the camaraderie of training and fundraising with a team. Your event is their new community.
• The "Cause-Driven Advocate": Their pain is a feeling of helplessness in the face of a health issue. They have a personal connection to your nonprofit's mission and are desperate for a tangible way to fight back and make a difference. Your event is their weapon.

See the difference? We're no longer talking about generic cyclists. We're talking about deeply human motivations. Once you've isolated these 'nightmares', you can build your entire ad strategy—your targeting, your copy, your images—around solving them. This is how you create ads that people can't ignore.

We'll need to look at your offer...

Now that we understand the real motivations, let's talk about your 'offer'. The number one reason paid ad campaigns fail is a weak offer. And I don't mean a discount. Your offer is the value proposition, the transformation you promise.

You're not selling a bike ride. You're selling a feeling. You're selling accomplishment, community, and purpose.

Let's use the 'Problem-Agitate-Solve' copywriting framework to craft messages for each of our new ICPs. This is how you speak directly to their pain.

Your creatives should match these messages. For the 'Achiever', show a solo rider looking triumphant at the finish line. For the 'Community Seeker', show groups of riders laughing and high-fiving. For the 'Advocate', show powerful images that connect to the mission, maybe even featuring people your nonprofit has helped. This is far more powerful than just showing "women" an ad with women in it.

I'd say you simplify your campaign structure...

To your main question: "Am I making this more complicated then it should be?". Yes, absolutely. And that's a good thing to realise now. Creating a dozen different ad sets for tiny audiences is a classic beginner mistake. Facebook's algorithm needs data—at least 50 conversions per ad set per week—to learn who your best participants are and find more people like them. If you split your budget across too many ad sets, none of them will get enough data to perform well. It's called 'exiting the learning phase', and it's vital for performance.

Instead of your complex plan, I'd propose a simple, powerful three-stage funnel. This structure is used by professional advertisers for a reason: it works.

You'll run one campaign for each stage of this funnel. The ToFu campaign will have the biggest budget, as its job is to feed new people into the top. The MoFu and BoFu campaigns will have smaller budgets and will focus on reminding and persuading those who have already shown some interest. This is how you build momentum and avoid wasting money on people who aren't a good fit.

You probably should rethink your campaign objective...

This is probably the single most important piece of advice I can give you. When you set up your campaign, Facebook asks for your 'objective'. Your idea to "geofence bike shops" sounds like you might be tempted to choose "Reach" or "Brand Awareness".

Do not do this. It's a trap.

When you tell the algorithm your goal is "Reach," you're giving it a very specific command: "Find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price." The algorithm does exactly what you asked. It seeks out users inside your targeting who are least likely to click, least likely to engage, and absolutely, positively least likely to ever sign up for a multi-month fundraising event. Why? Because those users are not in demand. Their attention is cheap. You are actively paying Facebook to find you the worst possible audience for your event.

You must *always* optimise for the action you actually want. In your case, this is likely a "Lead" (for the team captains) or a "Complete Registration" (for individuals). This tells the algorithm to ignore the cheap, passive users and hunt for the people within your audience who have a history of actually filling out forms and signing up for things. It will cost more per impression, but infinitely less per actual participant. Awareness is a byproduct of a campaign that actually works, not a goal in itself.

You'll need to calculate your numbers...

Before you spend a single pound, you need a rough idea of what to expect. There's no magic number for cost per registration, as it depends on your location, audience, and how compelling your event is. However, we can make an educated guess based on industry benchmarks.

For event signups in developed countries, you might see a Cost Per Click (CPC) between £0.50 and £1.50. A decent event landing page should convert between 10% and 30% of those clicks into registrations. Let's do the maths: your Cost Per Registration could range from £1.67 (£0.50 / 30%) on the very optimistic end, to £15 (£1.50 / 10%) on the more pessimistic side. I remember one campaign we worked on for a sports event where we achieved signups for under £2, but that required a lot of optimisation.

To help you plan your budget, I've built a small interactive calculator. Play around with the sliders to see how the numbers change. This will help you set realistic goals and ask for the right amount of budget from your nonprofit.

This is the main advice I have for you:

Alright, let's pull all of this together into an actionable plan. Stop trying to boil the ocean with dozens of ad ideas. Start simple, prove the model, and then you can expand later once you have data on what's actually working. Here's what I would recommend for the first 4-6 weeks of your campaign.

This structure is clean, logical, and lets the algorithm do its job. After a couple of weeks, you'll have clear data showing which ToFu interests are performing best, and you can start to scale the winners and turn off the losers.

I know this is a lot to take in, and moving from theory to actually setting this all up in Ads Manager can feel daunting. The principles are straightforward, but the execution requires experience to get right—from setting up your conversion tracking pixel correctly to analysing the results and making the right adjustments.

If you'd like to go over your specific situation in more detail and see how a structure like this could be implemented for your event, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation. We can take a look at your website and plans together and give you some more tailored advice.

Either way, I hope this helps you get on the right track. You've clearly got the passion for the event, and with a more focused strategy, you can definitely smash your participation goals.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh