Abdulaziz Khummash is the head of digital marketing at Al-Wedad Foundation for Development, overseeing digital marketing strategy and operations. Yousef Bawazir is a digital marketing specialist, managing the non-profit’s digital campaigns.
At Saudi Arabian non-profit, Al-Wedad Foundation for Development, we’ve got a really important job. We provide comprehensive care for orphans under the age of two, actively seeking suitable families to take care of them, and helping integrate them into society.
To make this all a reality, we rely on people’s donations.
For our past digital donation drives, we’ve run campaigns during key seasonal moments — think Ramadan or Hajj — turning them off when those moments are over. Results showed us that not only were those campaigns not fulfilling their full potential, but we were also missing out on reaching people who wanted to help at other key moments throughout the year. We had to up our marketing game to find donors consistently and on a wider scale.
Industry research provided to us by Google revealed that AI would be ideal for helping us scale our marketing efforts.
Saving time and resources with auto recommendations and value conversion tracking
We worked with Google to kick start our AI integration journey during Ramadan this year, a time when charity becomes even more important to people across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
With non-profits under pressure to operate at lower costs and maximise resource utilisation, the most exciting aspect for us was AI’s time-saving element.
In the past, we manually updated our Google ads. This year, we switched to auto apply recommendations, a set of AI-driven ad improvements that automatically enhance text and display ads. These recommendations can suggest keywords, refine bid strategies, or turn on other features — all while saving us time and resources.
We also implemented value conversion tracking, which allows us to monitor the customer journey on our website and capture online donations generated by our paid ads. This measurement formed the backbone of our AI-powered ad strategy, enabling us to run automated bidding strategies that optimise campaigns based on our objectives and provide valuable insights into their effectiveness.
Implementing these solutions freed us to focus on more strategic concerns.
Ensuring a steady flow of contributions through AI-powered Search campaigns
Relying on donations to operate means we have to make sure that every cent that’s given to us is strategically used and accounted for. After all, we want to keep the bulk of our funds available for the children we’re helping.
While we’re very fortunate to have a pool of regular donors, new supporters also help to revive our cause, offering fresh waves of engagement and funding. To optimise success, it was important to reach both existing and new donors.
Maximise conversions bidding helped us hone in on capturing recurring smaller donations from donors, ensuring a steady flow of contributions to assist orphans.
With this in mind, we launched two AI-powered Search campaigns, leveraging maximise conversion value bidding, and maximise conversions bidding.
The first solution used AI to automatically set bids to boost the revenue generated within our given budget, maximising our return on ad spend (ROAS). As our charity campaigns generate donations of different values, this bidding strategy was particularly useful as it allowed us to focus on collecting higher-value donations from paid clicks.
The second solution generated the most campaign conversions within our allocated budget. This helped us hone in on capturing recurring smaller donations from donors, ensuring a steady flow of contributions to assist orphans.
We also paired our Search campaigns with AI-powered broad match to efficiently reach as many donors as possible. This keyword match type allows ads to show up on searches related to the meaning of a brand’s keywords, even if they don’t contain the actual keyword terms.
For example, if our broad match keyword was “donation for orphans”, our ads also showed on searches for the keywords “donate for an orphan”, “how to take care of an orphan”, and “orphan charity”.
Measuring success by helping 72 orphans find a home
One of the major benefits of our multi-faceted, automated approach was that we could cater our campaigns to different donor segments, from high-net-worth individuals to frequent donors generously offering smaller amounts. And it proved to be a great success.
We raised over USD $1.5 million in donations during the first half of the year, representing an impressive 110% year-on-year increase. Alongside this, the number of people contributing to our cause grew by 25%, reflecting a substantial growth in our supporter base.
Most importantly, our AI-driven campaign allowed us to provide loving homes for over 72 orphaned children.
Sharing the love through content that builds trust
Our work wasn’t over yet, however. It was important to us to showcase the incredible impact that our AI-powered campaign had on the children we support. We believed that sharing this would not only encourage existing donors to continue to contribute to our cause, but would also build trust with new supporters.
That’s why we created a number of feel-good videos and AI-driven responsive display ads to give people a deeper understanding of our organisation’s profound influence on the lives of the children we serve.
This video, for example, shows an orphan meeting their family in Saudi Arabia, reinforcing the purpose and dedication behind our cause:
And this video uses the voices of two children to share the impact that finding a home can have.
The next step on the AI journey
We were initially hesitant about relying entirely on AI to enhance our donation campaigns. However, our in-depth understanding of our audience and industry, paired with Google's knowledge of AI and marketing, resulted in heart-warming success.
We’ll be exploring AI-powered Demand Gen next, with our goal being to generate interest among, and proactively show ads to, people who might be interested in supporting our cause.
We’ve got more Ramadan inspiration for you. Discover three easy-to-action marketing tips to help your ads stand out, learn how to own the online video moment during the holy month, understand how Christian Dior Parfums used augmented reality ads to reach more than 4 million people over Eid, and uncover three video trends likely to shape Ramadan content this year.
