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Raising Funds During a Pandemic
❝ We have been running the Ramadan campaign for the past six years, for Asia, ADA managed to drive significant growth across the region. ADA also provided us with smart audience targeting strategies, locally relevant multi-channel media plans, support on content creation including video, and an influencer campaign that was pivotal to the success of increasing awareness during Ramadan.❞
The client, a Global Refugee Agency, runs a global Ramadan fundraising campaign to engage the public and raise funds towards the plight of refugees. The campaign encouraged people to ‘Imagine’ themselves in refugee situations and to show their support during the holy month of Ramadan.
This year, their Ramadan fundraising campaign coincided with the peak of COVID-19.
Consumer behaviour had shifted drastically because of the pandemic. We quickly pivoted our strategy to meet their changing behaviour. Combining current audience behavioural insights, social buzz and past Ramadan insights, we devised a targeting strategy that allowed us to reach the targeted audiences online and glocalised the campaign to inspire and inject a sense of motivation and energy among the public towards the refugee cause and drove audiences to take action.
An ‘old-meets-new’ targeting strategy, based off our propriety data management platform, XACT. This allowed us to reach a specific audience who would otherwise have been almost impossible to identify
Infused local flavour into the global fundraising campaign to tug at the communities’ heart strings and purses.
The challenges we faced were direct results of the drastic change in consumer behaviour brought by COVID-19. So we dove deep into these shifts and looked at past Ramadan insights to formulate our strategy.
Based on our audience insights of past Ramadan patterns, we carefully optimised our execution to coincide with peaks in audience behaviour, which has gotten us unprecedented results!
Our client was going up against global as well as local charity organisations this Ramadan. Local NGOs had the upper hand as their community ties were strong. We tapped onto social listening. And saw a vast increase in influencers conversing on Ramadan in the current climate.
We saw an opportunity to leverage on the social prowess of influencers. We coupled this with ‘glocalised’ campaign – leveraging local channels and personalities, with local messaging that would bring the refugees’ plight closer to home through storytelling.
Our central creative theme was “Imagine”. We wanted to showcase the daily realities of refugees through powerful messages: “Imagine a country without people, imagine a mosque without prayers, imagine an Iftar without gatherings”.
The strong relevance to Ramadan hit home for the target segment, triggering them to imagine and feel what refuges have been subjected to most of their lives.
Working with partners like HHWT (Have Halal Will Travel) and MIN (Muslim Influencers Agency), we harvested their strong influence and understanding of certain cultures. Riding on the same storytelling angle, HHWT crafted content pieces based off the refugees’ plights for their readers and amplified through their social channels.
With MIN, we handpicked influencers that were known for their strong local community ties and philanthropy efforts to drive our cause. Their brief was similar, appeal to their followers through “Imagine” storytelling. Instagram stories and videos of the influencers sharing what Ramadan looks like without their generosity tugged at heart strings and wallets.
Our local initiatives were an impetus for donors to open up their wallets to the refugees.
Ramadan fund raising is time sensitive campaign . There’s a short 6-week window of opportunity thus scheduling optimisation is pivotal to driving optimal results. We relied heavily on consumer insights for budget, content and objective deployment.
Our scheduling was based on Ramadan consumer behaviours and past Ramadan learnings.
Paired with bespoke creatives and calls-to-action at each stage, every day was fully optimised for donations.
Overall donations exceeded target by 37%
Overall Cost Per Acquisition reduced by 273%
An overall whopping 68% uplift in ROI
*2.5 times above target
87% positive sentiments from influencers’ community
*Calculated based on number of comments in relation to negative comments