Supporting Breast Cancer Now to exceed their lottery acquisition target
As changes across the paid media landscape make lottery acquisition more challenging, we’ve been working with Breast Cancer Now to refine channel strategy, improve efficiency and exceed annual player acquisition target ahead of schedule.
Breast Cancer Now
The results
- 1,499 new lottery players acquired
- 111% of the annual sign-up target achieved
- 12m impressions
The client
A long-term partnership with Breast Cancer Now
Breast Cancer Now is the UK’s leading breast cancer research and support charity. They support people affected by breast cancer while working towards a future where everyone diagnosed lives and is supported to live well.
We’ve partnered with Breast Cancer Now since 2019, supporting them with digital strategy, fundraising, AI, SEO and campaign delivery. Together, we've built a deep understanding of their audiences through years of campaign delivery, experimentation and continuous improvement.
One area of that partnership is the Pink Ribbon Lottery. Since 2020, we’ve supported Breast Cancer Now to grow the programme, attracting new players and generating sustainable income to support their work.
The challenge
Growing lottery sign-ups across a changing platform landscape
The Pink Ribbon Lottery is an important regular giving product for Breast Cancer Now, giving supporters a simple way to contribute regularly while entering prize draws.
For the 2025–26 financial year, the objective was to acquire 1,320 new lottery players, while managing spend efficiently across multiple paid media channels.
During the campaign, changes to Meta's advertising environment created additional challenges for conversion tracking and optimisation. Meta introduced restrictions that affected conversion tracking for health-related organisations, reducing the signals available for campaign optimisation.
Our approach
Building on years of optimisation
The campaign ran across Meta, Google Search and Performance Max, with each channel playing a distinct role.
Meta remained the primary acquisition channel, helping reach both cold and warm audiences at scale. Google Search helped capture people actively searching for the lottery, while Performance Max helped uncover additional conversion opportunities.
Spotify was also tested as an awareness channel earlier in the campaign. While it supported reach, it generated fewer direct conversions, so spend was redirected into channels that were more effective for acquisition.
Adapting to Meta tracking changes
Meta’s health-category restrictions affected the conversion signals available to the campaign, making optimisation more challenging.
Working with Breast Cancer Now, we adapted our tracking approach and restored stronger visibility over time, allowing campaigns to optimise more effectively again.
This was a useful reminder of how much accurate tracking matters for paid media performance, especially when campaigns rely on conversion signals to reach the right audiences.
Refreshing creative alongside Breast Cancer Now’s rebrand
In March 2026, Breast Cancer Now launched a refreshed brand identity. This created an opportunity to update the Pink Ribbon Lottery campaign creative while keeping the prize-led messaging that had already proved effective.
Our creative team refreshed the paid social assets so they felt consistent with the new brand while still standing out in busy feeds. The ads continued to use simple, prize-led messages such as turning £1 into something exciting, while keeping the cause visible and emotionally connected.
The refreshed ads went live in March, followed by an updated lottery landing page in April. Together, these changes helped drive the strongest period of performance seen during the campaign.
The week commencing 28 April delivered 95 new sign-ups, while May became the best-performing month, with 305 new players acquired.
My visual design approach leaned into hand-drawn elements to bring a more organic, human warmth to the campaign, reflecting the emotional nature of the cause. The illustrations helped soften the prize-led messaging and gave each asset a greater sense of care and personality. At the same time, we rooted everything in Breast Cancer Now’s recent rebrand, using their refreshed colour palette and visual style to ensure the campaign felt unmistakably theirs. The challenge was balancing brand consistency with creating something distinctive enough to stand out in busy social feeds.
Jeth Ordeniza Interaction Designer, Torchbox
The outcomes
Exceeding acquisition targets ahead of schedule
Despite several months of reduced tracking visibility on Meta, the campaign exceeded its annual sign-up target before the end of the financial year.
Results to date include:
- 1,499 new lottery players acquired
- 111% of the annual sign-up target achieved
- 12.5 million impressions
- Compared to 2021, sign-ups have increased by 38%, and CPA has reduced by 37%.
The campaign also performed strongly compared to the previous financial year. With July still to be completed, new player acquisition is already 8% higher year-on-year, while CPA is 28.1% lower.
The campaign is still live, with final results to be confirmed at the end of the financial year.
Since Torchbox took over full management of our paid social lottery campaign, we've seen a significant reduction in our CPA, which has allowed us to gradually increase our spend without compromising ROI, helping us recruit more lottery players, and generate more sustainable income to fund our research and services. Beyond that, the team are so easy to work with - super knowledgeable, responsive and pro-active, helping us navigate through various changes and challenges. I would highly recommend them.
Charlotte Wade Senior Manager, Lottery and Raffle
Looking to grow your lottery campaign?
Find out how lottery campaigns could fit into your fundraising mix or improve the performance of an existing campaign.
Tanya Ellis-Puk Senior Digital Marketing Executive
Get in touch
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