Missions to Movements
Missions to Movements is the nonprofit marketing and fundraising podcast that helps you grow recurring donors, scale monthly giving programs, and build digital campaigns that convert.
Hosted by Dana Snyder—speaker, strategist, and founder of Positive Equation—this show is packed with actionable nonprofit growth strategies, social media tips, and fundraising best practices.
Each week, you’ll hear how organizations are increasing donor retention, building thought leadership, and using digital fundraising to drive real impact. If you want to learn how to attract monthly donors, master nonprofit marketing, and transform your mission into a movement, this podcast is for you.
Missions to Movements
The Strategy Behind MHIF's Heart-Healthy Pumpkin Soup Lead Magnet That Attracted 246 Subscribers
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Do you think Facebook ads are challenging and confusing? Cassie Turczyn from the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation is here to guide us through her journey of conquering the complexity of paid ads, resulting in over 21,000 impressions and 200+ new emails for their list!
The last round of my Grow Your List Ads Challenge paved the way for MHIF to expand their reach and attract potential donors, so today, we’re sharing their tactical case study.
Cassie walks us through the entire $375 ad campaign, the audiences they targeted, how they used Canva for ad graphics, and how they harnessed the power of Facebook Ads to capture the attention of 250+ new email leads.
She also shares all the details around their email welcome sequence, and how they target and engage new subscribers.
P.S. Do you want to grow your email list with 100+ new email subscribers…in JUST 7 days?! Click here to join my Grow Your List March Challenge!
Resources & Links
Cassie would love to connect with you on LinkedIn and you can learn more about the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation on their website.
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Facebook Ads Training Success Story
Speaker 1My initial opinion before taking the training was that ads are just challenging . They're confusing . There's lots of options . As a marketer myself , I knew that they were powerful and I knew that they were something that I wanted us to invest and learn more about . And even as a social media user myself , I kind of internalize what makes me stop and listen and look and kind of take that as my first step of when I want to create ads . What am I making that's going to make me stop ? And I always say it has to be quick , it has to move and it has to be actionable .
Speaker 2Hey , there , you're listening to the Missions to Movement podcast and I'm your host , dana Snyner , digital Strategist for Non-Profits and Founder and CEO of Positive Equations . This show highlights the digital strategies of organizations making a positive impact in the world . Ready to learn the latest trends , actionable tips and the real stories from behind the feed ? Let's transform your mission into a movement . Hello everyone , happy Wonderful Wednesday . If you are listening live , this is part of a like a double header episode day where I'm getting to chat with two previous participants of my Grow your List Ads Challenge and on with us right now we have Cassie Turgeon . I'm so excited that you are here . Welcome to the show .
Speaker 1Hello , thank you . Thank you for having me .
Speaker 2You are so welcome , and everyone , as Cassie just told me before we hit record that this is her first podcast appearance , so please send her all the warm love and support and just radiation and tell her how much goodness she's bringing into the world and what she's doing . Cassie , where is the best place for people just like to shout you down and to give you praise once this episode is released ?
Speaker 1Yes , absolutely . You can find me on LinkedIn . Please connect with me . Always looking to grow my network with other marketing nonprofit professionals , Shoot me a message . I'm always open and willing to talk about anything ad marketing related whatever , I love it .
Speaker 2Okay , and you are the Digital Marketing Project Manager at the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation and in the past five years , I love how you share . You just like bootstrapped your way into learning digital marketing and fundraising and I think , amen , as we all have . What is the mission ? Tell us a little bit about what is the work that you do at the foundation .
Speaker 1Yeah , absolutely so , the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation , and I'll just say MHIF because our name is a mouthful . So , yeah , mhif , much quicker , easier to say . So our mission is to improve cardiovascular health of individuals and communities through innovative research and education . So we're a nonprofit that partners with doctors who are cardiologists . They lead research that saves lives locally , worldwide . So really intelligent work . Where I'm not really part of any of the research side of it , my job is to lift up that research and education and kind of share all the great work that we do to patients , promote our events to donors and our community and kind of grow awareness for what we do in Minnesota and beyond .
Speaker 2Beautiful , Thank you for sharing that , and you joined the Grow your List ads challenge in September last year and we're also looking for some email growth . Hey , how did you hear about it ? Why did you end up joining the challenge ? What was like the current need that you're looking to fill at the time ?
Speaker 1Yeah , so kind of a multifaceted answer to this . So I've been at MHIF for three years and I've always been told one of the biggest challenges they face is they're not well known locally . You might go into the hospital and see a cardiologist , you might even participate in research and might not know that it's MHIF that is supporting that work and supporting the research that you're doing . So I would say MHIF is like a very not well known hidden gem in the Twin Cities . So it's kind of a challenge for me personally is like how do we fix that issue ? We want everyone to know who we are and that we exist and I always advocated that . You know , digital marketing through Facebook is going to be a great avenue for us to kind of tackle that challenge , get our name out there and more known in the local community . Luckily , last year we set aside a really great budget to start doing Facebook ads and for myself to start learning how to use that platform , because without a budget I can't even start to learn how to do such ads Exactly . So last September it all kind of collided into just like a really perfect timeline , if I'm being honest , where I was learning the platform by myself for a few months , played around with a few different things Of course , watched lots of webinars , but never had the chance to like personally ask someone . Okay , well , what does this thing do ? How do I accomplish this goal ? And I had been following you for a while , dana , and I was like , oh my gosh , this is like kind of a perfect opportunity . Like it's kind of a one to many training . Like let's go for it . This is finally like the chance for me to have that time where I can really learn and have a personalized kind of training , not like super personalized , but you know as close as you're going to get . So , taking that course , even though it was for , like particular new leads ads , it really opened my eyes to all the other tools that the platform on Facebook has as well . Like audiences , I never knew that you could like make an audience to that platform . So , yeah , learning what new leads ads were , how well that they performed with a very low budget , and then being able to share those results with my team they're like holy smokes . Like this is a great way to get new people to our system who can possibly become donors one day .
Speaker 2Yes , and I do want to touch on the fact you mentioned something really key and I do this too of going to a bunch of free webinars to try and learn something , to DIY it , and I think there are things that you can absolutely do and then implement . What was the difference , do you think of doing a free webinar on ads in particular , versus actually going through the ads challenge together ?
Speaker 1Yeah , that's a great question Because someone in nonprofits you're going to look for the free resources first and there's plenty of them and there's plenty of great ones but honestly like being able to share my screen , ask questions to the group and say , okay , this is like the exact thing that I'm pressing . Is this the right thing ? Why shouldn't I choose the others , like those very nitty gritty in the weeds questions , but just not being able to ask that previously , when I was doing ads myself , and whether you have success or failures and you might not know why because you don't have anyone to ask , it was great to have that personalization in the group .
Speaker 2Yeah , it was so fun having you in there and we're going to dive into . You created a great lead magnet and beautiful ad graphics . I mean you just rocked it . You did so good . That's why I want to share it with everybody . Be like look what you created , like , this is so beautiful , it's so possible . So you were kind of like toying with social ads beforehand , but what was your initial opinion prior to using them ?
Speaker 1My initial opinion before taking the training was that ads are just challenging . They're confusing . There's lots of options . As a marketer myself , I knew that they were powerful and I knew that they were something that I wanted us to invest and learn more about . And even as a social media user myself , I kind of internalize what makes me stop and listen and look and kind of take that as my first step of when I want to create ads . What am I making that's going to make me stop ? Exactly , and I always say like it has to be quick , it has to move and it has to be actionable . So how do you do that ?
Speaker 2I love it , but how do you actually create that thing that you're seeing ?
Speaker 1Yeah , yeah , so good , and you did , I did , yeah , and I would say , looking back six months ago , the thought process of like what's in now that's going to work , I could think that through , but how am I going to execute that ? Six months ago I would have said I would have tumbled through it . But where I am now , months after the course from last September , what my capabilities have expanded to doing is like two or three fold .
Speaker 2Yes , amazing yes , cassie .
Speaker 1I love hearing that .
Speaker 2Oh my God , that's amazing . That's amazing . Okay , and I want to hear about where you are now . Let's take us back to September . I want to walk everybody through the beautiful ads that you created . So now they have a little bit of understanding about what your mission is right . So you're obviously very heart , your Heart Institute Foundation , heart focused . How did you come up with the idea for your lead magnet and share with everybody what that was ?
Speaker 1Well , first of all , it was kind of fun to brainstorm in the group training . We were all like , okay , this is what I do in my work , this is what our mission is . Here's my few ideas that I have what resonates with the group and I think I had two or three ideas . But when I shared with the group oh , what about ? Like a fall soup recipe ? Everyone was like , yes , cassie , do that , everyone is going to want to see your heart healthy soup recipe . So I was like , okay , I'll start working on it . Luckily we have a dietitian on staff so she kind of helped me walk through . Like how to actually make the heart healthy recipe . So there's nutrition facts , all of that . It's totally a legit recipe piece of content that folks when they go through the ad and they click through to it . It's a nice PDF you can print it out . It's a nice , beautiful recipe that you would get in return for giving us your information . And as far as the ad graphic and the creative itself .
Speaker 2I'm going to pause real quick before we go to ad graphics . I thought what was also interesting is you also had some research looking at your website and you have information and content on your site that is like scientific in nature , right ? Yes , in detail . And then you have what you call a patient friendly resources , like something like a recipe . What did you notice on the blog content ? Because I think this also spoke to the reason of why selecting that recipe . There was some data there .
Speaker 1Yeah , you're exactly right . As far as the content that we have on our website and what we normally share online and on social media , we have two main audiences that we usually curate our content towards . One is this very professional doctor , medicine , medicinal field , research paper sort of driven audience that can understand the research , read the nitty-gritty . The other is that patient kind of top of funnel , awareness based audience that just wants to read the top of mind , easy to digest content like recipes , like fun blogs . So on Facebook , I pretty sure our audience at this point is going to be more of that patient focused type audience . So when thinking about what audience we would best be able to focus on for Facebook , I was definitely leaning towards the patient focused audience . And a recipe is just kind of a a shoe in everyone can read , use recipes , especially for that kind of older generation of folks that might start be thinking more about their heart health Like . It's a great first step in understanding who we are as an organization and just get our name out there on a recipe card .
Speaker 2Yes , and the idea of it also . It was very specific . It was a was it pumpkin soup .
Speaker 1Yeah , heart , healthy pumpkin soup .
Speaker 2Yes , it was falling right into that fall cultural moment that was happening , which was so smart . Ok , I had to take a quick break here because I needed to ask you are you ready to run your own social ads , to grow your own email list with 100 plus new people ready to learn about your mission in just seven days ? Yeah , I'm here to help make that happen . I will work with you on creating your lead magnet , review your ad creative , your ad copy and make sure that we're setting up your ads for success . The next round of my grow your list ads challenge starts the week of March 11th . Right around the corner , limited spots are left . This happens in a small group container , so click the link in the show notes or go to my website , positive equation dot com , to learn more and secure your spot Now . The next ads challenge will not run until September , so if you want a big boost to your email list now and to nurture those people leading up to giving season , click the link in the show notes or go to my website again , positive equation dot com to learn more . So now I do want to dive into your ad creative , which was beautiful , and you created it all in Canva , right ?
Speaker 1All in Canva , yep .
Speaker 2All in Canva is beautiful and we had two different ad graphics . Can you just like explain what was the difference between the two ? Or ?
Speaker 1Yeah . So first of all , canva great Cannot recommend that enough as a tool for creating your graphics , especially pro accounts that you get for free at nonprofits . It just yes , you can make so many different sizes , so you can also make like the Instagram size as well to go with your ads . It's all just so easy . So I ended up finding two , three photos on Canva that were just beautiful pumpkin soup .
Facebook Ad Campaigns and Lead Generation
Speaker 2Beautiful photos , If you want to see these . By the way , I will put the images in the show notes for everybody to check out .
Speaker 1Perfect . So pumpkin soup is big front and center on the ad . That's the first thing you basically will see . And then I just had some animations of the text . I think just like get a heart healthy pumpkin soup recipe for tonight or something like that as text . That moved in . So when you scroll that's the in my opinion the animation that might make you stop . And the actual ad copy itself was like a sentence Like what are you having for dinner tonight ? Do you want to stay cozy and have soup ? Heart healthy soup , yeah , cozy , Also healthy tonight with pumpkin soup .
Speaker 2It was so good , it was so simple , and let's talk about what did you end up spending ?
Speaker 1Yes , so I've got the exact numbers . So over seven days , we ended up spending $375 . And through the course , which I thought was really , really cool was targeting those different audiences and learning well , one , learning how to target different audiences and have all the same ad graphics go towards those and then changing , as the days pass , depending on which audiences are working better , what your spend is looking like for each graphic . So we targeted three different audiences lookalikes , facebook users in Minnesota , and then also a warm audience , which were essentially our Facebook and Instagram followers . By far , the lookalike audience is what performed the best for us . That was an audience where we told Facebook hey , take our Facebook followers and people that have visited our page and engaged in our content within the past 180 days and make lookalikes of them and show them the sad .
Speaker 2Look at you , cassie , you're a pro . I'm love like listening to you explain this like you're crushing it , thank you .
Speaker 1I rehearsed a little bit maybe .
Speaker 2Dude so good . Okay , so your three audiences so interesting . So Megan is talking about her ads and her lookalikes like bombed . So this is what's so interesting ? Everybody's unique , everyone's unique . That's why , like , it's not a one-size-fits-all . That's why we do these tests is because we need to know and like your saved audience , your she's not going to target to Minnesota . That makes sense for you , right ? Like everyone's going to have their unique audiences . So we go through individually , based on the organization , and we think about what three audiences make sense to test . So your most successful was your lookalike , which is super interesting . What was your ? How many total overall leads did you generate ?
Speaker 1Yeah , so we totaled 246 leads and that resulted in a dollar and 50 per lead , so super cheap . Imagine if each of those people donated $5 one day , like Insane 1,000% worth it .
Speaker 2Yes , yes , that's incredible , incredible . And you reached overall how many people with this ad ?
Speaker 1Yeah , so we had 21,000 impressions and 13,000 reach .
Speaker 2Awesome You're also getting with these ads . I mean , the goal is Lee , the goal is our email subscribers . You're also getting brand awareness of just having your logo in this ad being shown to all of these people . Amazing , so once you had people go through and they signed up . Something that we talked about during the challenge was an email welcome series . What did your email series look like ?
Speaker 1We had a three-email journey that we sent all these new leads on . So the first email was just kind of a general . This is who MHIF is . We're excited you've joined our community . Here's a few links to our website if you're interested in reading . But we're just excited to hear Welcome to the community . And our email system is kind of cool where it allows us to make that judgment , depending on what they do with that first email . So we had a chunk of folks who opened that email Great . And then we had another chunk of folks that didn't open that email after , let's say , five days . Then we'll end up resending you that first email , just so you get the chance to read it again and we have like scoring . So if you did open that first email , you'll get maybe plus 10 score , and if you didn't , we'll just resend you the next email .
Speaker 2Interesting .
Speaker 1Yeah , we use part-out through Salesforce , so it kind of allows us to curate this potentially very high score for some of these folks for our giving officers to really target in , like , oh Dana opened all these emails and she has a really high score now , so maybe it's worth reaching out to her in the future .
Speaker 2Interesting , okay , a very mature viewpoint at . That's cool , though I like that you can see that engagement .
Speaker 1Yeah , absolutely so . The second email was patient stories . So that's one of our really highly read pieces of content is our impact stories , reading how our patients experienced our research . So second email was sending them to the impact of our work . And then the third email was just another fun engagement . We do a lot of pop quizzes , at least in the past year since I've been here . So pop quiz on heart disease how much do you know about heart disease ? And the call to action leads them back to our website .
Speaker 2Amazing and I think what's interesting is . I love to talk about unsubscribes because some people are like , okay , well , these leads , are they going to stick around ? So how many of those emails are still like actively engaged ?
Speaker 1We had 246 leads as of today . How many months has it been ? Six months maybe , just about ? Yeah , 226 are still mailable and are still staying engaged .
Speaker 2Amazing . In the past six months have you run another lead generation ad campaign yet .
Speaker 1We have not yet . So fall is our very crazy busy event Season and then we have the end of your giving , but I am currently building our 2024 calendar , still not used to staying 2024 . And what we want to do for new leads ads again this year . I think recipes are probably another shoe in which probably just do another like summer heart healthy salad . Yes , be great .
Speaker 2Oh my gosh , you could do so many just around top cultural moments . Think about things for Mother's Day , father's Day , st Patrick's Day and just Easter , like when people are coming together around the table . What's a recipe that you can make with your family ? I don't know . There's so many . Like for all generations Heart Healthy like .
Speaker 1Yes , you can go wild and exploring things . Yeah , it's Heart Month in February , so we're doing lots of ads around that , mostly towards fundraising Next year . It's a long ways away . What I would love to do is like a coloring page so people can get downloaded a coloring page maybe , or for Thanksgiving , like a colored Thanksgiving card , maybe from our like staff's kids that like drew little things , do you ?
Speaker 2know what I actually asked for for my birthday this year . I asked my husband to get me like a paint in numbers kit Fun . Yes , it's very like on theme Adults wanting to color and paint . It's like taking a breath away from technology for a minute . So I think that would be brilliant , like an adult coloring page . Even it doesn't have to be like kid-centric . I think it's so smart .
Speaker 1Absolutely Well . In our audience is a lot of what could be grandparents or soon to be grandparents . So yeah , maybe something like for their kids or for their grandkids .
Speaker 2The grandkids . Yeah , now you're thinking .
Speaker 1Yeah , yes .
Speaker 2So good . Okay , cassie , can I ask you what is one thing that you would like to ask for help and support on it ? And actually , before I ask that question , just like congratulations , I'm so stinking proud of you . We had such a great group in September and I love to like see your confidence with ads moving forward and it's just . It makes me so happy to see , as a teacher , like I just try and plant the seed and then get you guys excited and see that it's possible . So , yes , you rock .
Speaker 1Great job , absolutely . Thank you so much . I really I can't like speak enough about like how many doors this is open for me , even though it was , you know , three Zoom sessions and some working at home on these things . Like it's just really changed the way that I work on Facebook . So , thank you , wow , that's amazing Cassie .
Speaker 2I love to hear that . Yay , Yay , congratulations . You deserve it all . Congrats . That's huge . So , which is actually perfectly leading to now , what is one thing that you would like to ask for help or support on ?
Speaker 1Yeah , so in my experimenting with other Facebook ads , what we mostly do as an organization is we host a ton of events , so a lot of our Facebook campaigns are for getting people to a landing page to hopefully register , and some events are really successful for this , especially ones that are free . Others are harder , obviously with a price point that folks have to pay to register . We noticed recently , even with one of our events that was free , we were getting a lot of great clicks , like the click-through ratio and like what we were paying per click was super low , but we only got like a very small handful of people that actually registered and , granted , this was an in-person event , it was not virtual , okay . So I'm just curious if you have any thoughts on how to improve ads that are seemingly performing well on Facebook , for the actual registrations that you're getting , or whatever goal you're getting , is not coming to fruition .
Speaker 2Great question . So I would look at a couple of things . I would A if your click-through rate is good , that means that you're getting the right people and your ad is working . But then I would look at is the signup page ? Is it loading slow ? Is the form daunting ? The other thing that you could test is actually having them sign up through a Facebook form instead of having them go out to a separate website . Have them actually just do the signup on the platform . That would be something to test Instead of thinking about it just as a lead ad . We are collecting an email . They're actually RSVPing for an event in that form . That could be an interesting to test . But again , I would check out your if it's in person , making sure that they realize that , making sure that it's really clear in the ad copy , if that's something that's deterring people for some reason . And then my last thing is I would , instead of doing a traffic campaign because what you're telling Meta is I want clicks , I just want people to go to this site Instead I would do a conversion campaign as if it's sales but it's actually signups , because you want them to actually finish filling out the form . So you want a different type of audience that's going to go all the way through . So I would change the ad type at the very beginning , if you're still having them go to the website , or I would test an actual form on Facebook .
Speaker 1Thank you . Yeah , that's great advice , because I think I was going off of traffic , because they have a little bullet for a landing page , because we are trying to get them to a landing page , but we want them to take an action after they get to said landing page . Yes , so I assume that that was correct , but be that as a May , when you have someone to ask , then a little bit of insight comes to mind .
Speaker 2That's right . I would A-B test doing a form directly on Facebook , very similar to the one that we set up together , and then I would test still sending people to the website , but having it be a conversion instead , and then make sure with your pixel that you have that button tracked as that item , or else it's not going to capture anything anyways . The other way to do it is , if you're having difficulty with the pixel , if you did have a landing page and you did run traffic to it , but it was only for paid traffic . That way you could tell that organic traffic isn't coming there . So you know exactly what your numbers are .
Speaker 1Right , yeah , no , that makes sense , thank you .
Speaker 2You're welcome , Cassie . Where can people connect with you ? Where can they follow up with you ?
Speaker 1LinkedIn . Please follow up with me , connect with me on LinkedIn . I need more people in my network , the nonprofit marketing folks out there . Please send me a message . I would love to chat literally about anything . It doesn't even have to be work related .
Speaker 2It doesn't have to be my friend . Yay , I love it .
Speaker 1Yay , I'll be your friend .
Speaker 2Cassie .
Speaker 1Okay , thank you Beautiful .
Speaker 2Thank you so much for being here . Thank you for all the hard work that you do at the Institute . They're grateful to have you .
Speaker 1Oh , thank you so much . It's a pleasure being on .
Speaker 2Can you tell I love talking all things digital To make this show better . I'd be so grateful for your feedback . Leave a review , take a screenshot of this episode , share it on Instagram stories and tag positive equation with one E so I can reshare and connect with you .
