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In an effort to boost registration during specific weeks at Big Break, I utilized paid Facebook advertisements to target students at schools that would be attending.
The first step in our strategic planning process was to determine which schools we would be targeting.
Non-Christian Schools
One group of students we wanted to target were those that attend non-Christian colleges that have Cru movements on their campuses and/or have attended Big Break in the past.
We looked at registration statistics from the past three years to pinpoint which schools would most likely be attending. Then, we compiled a list of the schools with the top 10 highest attendance in years past for each week of the conference.
Christian Schools
Another group we targeted was likeminded but uninvolved students at Christian schools. These students perhaps didn’t have Cru movements on their campuses and had never heard of Big Break but would be interested in spending their spring break on mission.
Strategy #1: Target individual schools (one ad → one school)
The first portion of our advertisements targeted individual schools. For these ads, we created customized target audiences. Typically, we targeted men and women, ages 18-22, then further narrowed the target pool down based on relevant interests.
Some of the interests we targeted within our audience included: the specific college they attended, missions, mission trips, Christianity, other Christian organizations on their campus (such as Navigators, Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Christian sororities and fraternities) and popular Christian speakers or music artists.
Here are results of ads that targeted individual schools:
Strategy #2: Target groups of schools (one ad → multiple schools)
We also created ads that targeted two groups of schools that were on spring break during Week 3 of Big Break. Here are the results of those ad sets:
We created a variety of advertisements using provided Big Break images and promotional material.
We also used the Big Break promotional video in place of a graphic for one of the advertisements.
In total, our ad campaign had a total reach of 53,917. Over 400 people clicked through to the Big Break registration website. While we did not see a particularly strong correlation between registration numbers and the dates our ads ran, our results point to a success in building brand awareness of the Big Break conference.
Through social media, thousands of people were exposed to the conference who may have not known about it before. In a continued effort to boost registration numbers, in the future, we would suggest conducting further research on when students begin planning their spring break trips, and implementing the ads in correlation with those results.
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