L'Étoile

Ursa Marketing’s mandate for L’Étoile

In 2021, the team at the non-profit organization L’Étoile, social pediatrics in the Haut-Richelieu community, retained the services of Ursa Marketing to boost its discoverability and accelerate its activities through online donations. Thanks to the Google Ad Grants program, digital advertising, and improved organic search ranking for its website, Ursa Marketing raised the profile of this local non-profit, which is especially close to its heart given its unique mission and its work within a shared community: that of the Haut-Richelieu. In fact, Ursa Marketing’s offices are located very close to those of L’Étoile, in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu.

L’Étoile has supported at-risk children and children in highly vulnerable situations in the Haut-Richelieu area through a unique model of social medicine based on the needs and rights of children since 2009.

L’Étoile’s mission: to provide social pediatric care and services in the community to children aged 0 to 18 living in difficult conditions in the Haut-Richelieu RCM.

What is community social pediatrics (CSP)?

Social pediatrics is a community-based approach that brings together medicine and social intervention in order to understand and support children living in difficult conditions. This approach is grounded in the belief that every child should have the same opportunities to grow up healthy and to develop their full potential while their rights are respected.

Care and services for children are delivered by a team of dedicated professionals and volunteers who work in partnership with the family, the community, and the network, like a large protective and caring circle. CSP makes it possible to identify and act on sources of toxic stress by drawing on the strengths of the child, their family, and the community.

Ursa Marketing’s mandate: build awareness of the organization and its services online within the Haut-Richelieu community and accelerate donation generation and volunteer recruitment online with the Google Ad Grants program, paid digital advertising, and visibility on search engines.

The challenges tied to the mandate

Carrying out our mandate came with significant challenges.

First, the external platform used for donation transactions on the website made it difficult to set up transaction measurement, since it limited our ability to collect data from third parties.

Next, because the non-profit’s various activities are local, they restricted us when it came to targeting campaigns on the search network with the Google Ad Grants program. This limited our use of the budget allocated by that program.

Finally, the program’s many strict Google Ad Grants rules required us to monitor and adjust the campaigns continuously to ensure compliance.

The digital marketing strategies and non-profit tactics deployed

We developed a comprehensive strategic approach, integrating a variety of digital tactics to meet the challenges tied to L’Étoile’s mandate.

Website and performance measurement

From the very start of the collaboration, we made sure to properly measure the various events on the website, such as submitted forms, event registrations, and online donation generation. Implementing complete performance measurement for platforms such as Google Analytics 4, Meta Ads, and Google Ads allowed us to measure the returns on the investment made across the various platforms. In addition, we coordinated with Zeffy’s support team to create a thank-you page following donations made on the platform, so we could measure the number of completed donations and their digital source. We also supported L’Étoile in restructuring its website’s information architecture and in updating several elements on it, including donation forms and event pages. All of this aimed to deliver an improved user experience and optimize the conversion rate.

SEO: organic search ranking

To boost L’Étoile’s discoverability in organic search engine results, we worked on putting in place a complete SEO optimization plan for the website. This upfront effort helps reduce advertising spend over the long term by improving the organization’s organic visibility. The various audits of the website’s structure and content allowed us to identify the issues to address in order to optimize L’Étoile’s search engine ranking. In addition, detailed research into high-volume keywords related to the services and the organization was carried out to guide the writing of SEO tags and the content of the pages to be optimized, always with the goal of positioning L’Étoile on relevant and highly searched queries on search engines. We also improved the ranking of L’Étoile’s Google Business Profile listing on Google’s search engine. This listing, which serves to increase the organization’s local visibility, was optimized by integrating relevant high-volume keywords, images, products (fundraising campaigns), and posts.

Google Ad Grants program and advertising campaigns

From the very beginning of the collaboration between Ursa Marketing and L’Étoile, we began the steps to enable the non-profit to join the Google Ad Grants program. This program helps non-profits make their causes known around the world. Every non-profit organization that meets the required conditions can receive up to US$10,000 per month in text search ads displayed on Google.com. Following the opening of the account and the granting of Google funding, we carried out the setup and optimization of several campaigns aimed at boosting the visibility of L’Étoile and its services, online donation generation, and online volunteer recruitment. All of this while making sure to comply with the many regulations surrounding Google Ad Grants account management.

Advertising campaigns

First, impactful awareness campaigns were run on the most popular advertising platforms, such as Meta Ads and Google Ads, to increase the visibility of the Guignolée food drive of the Centre de pédiatrie sociale en communauté du Haut-Richelieu. Various audiences were selected and tested, which allowed us to achieve optimal targeting and deliver significant results for L’Étoile in terms of visibility and online donations for its Guignolée. In the second phase of our push for L’Étoile’s Guignolée, we set up a remarketing campaign that made it possible to retarget website visitors as well as people who had interacted with recent posts on the social media pages, with a tailored message. This push greatly increased online donations and surpassed the targets that had been set. We then used several high-performing audiences in various one-off campaigns we set up, which helped generate numerous registrations for charitable events organized by L’Étoile.

L’Étoile’s Guignolée

During our advertising push in the winter of 2021-2022 for L’Étoile’s Guignolée, we observed an increase in online donations of more than 35%. This increase is attributable to our advertising efforts on the Meta Ads and Google Ads platforms, but also to organic search ranking.

This allowed L’Étoile to far exceed its set donation collection target and to position L’Étoile’s Guignolée as a must-attend event in the Haut-Richelieu community. Not to mention that these record results helped L’Étoile continue its work with more than 450 children in the Haut-Richelieu RCM living in highly vulnerable situations and whose current needs are growing.