5 Tips to Unlock the Potential of Nextdoor for Charity Campaigns

1. Choose UGC-feel photography to reach a higher level of engagement

Nextdoor requires at least 1 landscape image or video (1200x628px), although they recommend testing 3-5 images to gain learnings throughout the campaign.

Branded imagery doesn't perform well on the channel. Instead, choose an image that feels authentic and that has a local, neighbourly feel. For an event campaign for instance, use an image of people taking part in the event so people know what they're missing out on.

We found that images of people at last year's event worked best, and tested different variants throughout the campaign. The charity average for click-through rates (CTRs) stands at 0.4%, but with the right creative, we’ve seen CTRs of up to 2.66%.

2. Use Nextdoor’s localisation features

Ads on Nextdoor sees on average a 58% higher engagement for local messaging. So when thinking about your targeting, decide what role Nextdoor is going to have in your wider campaigns. For one of our recent campaigns, we targeted the top-performing postcodes from the campaign to drive sign ups at a low cost. For another campaign, we targeted the harder to reach areas to increase awareness.

Once you've chosen your locations, use local personalisation within the ad copy to generate a higher level of engagement. For this to work, you can use Nextdoor’s automation feature to insert the name of the local neighbourhood into your ad copy, e.g. “Sign up to our event in [LOCATION]" or "Don't miss out on our 10% discount on tickets in [LOCATION]".

3. Be patient - Nextdoor takes a little while to gain learnings

Conversion optimisation often takes a while to get going on this platform. In the graph below, you can see that conversions for a recent campaign began to increase properly after the platform had gained learnings, which was around 10 days after going live.

After this point, we began to optimise the creatives and introduce remarketing audiences.

4. Build remarketing audiences to reach non-converters

In order to keep up engagement with your new supporters on this channel, set up a retargeting audience for people who visit your campaign landing page but haven’t converted. You can then hit them with a more direct CTA. This allows you to warm up your audiences and capitalise on an increase in engaged users on the platform.

There are plenty of remarketing options on Nextdoor, such as using custom match lists and remarketing based on their page visits. You’d just need to check with your cookies policy on your website.

5. Use Nextdoor alongside your primary channels, and ensure you test, test and test again

In our experience, Nextdoor has generated a higher CPA than other channels. But, given that in one case, 99% were new users to the site, there is significant value in testing this channel alongside your core channel mix.

For longer-running campaigns, it’s worth testing creatives, messaging, and audience targeting to ensure you’re making the most of the platform.

Nextdoor’s targeting is fairly broad, but there is an audience that’s integral to the charity sector - a nonprofit interest. You can test this audience alongside interests or postcode targeting.

Similarly, as Nextdoor has a more personable tone and longer ad copy, it’s worth testing what resonates most with your target audience.

We look forward to bringing you a case study with further details on using Nextdoor for charity and nonprofit campaigns. In the meantime, follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter to stay up to date.