Raising £1.4 million with a virtual challenge fundraiser

We’ve been working with Breast Cancer Now since 2019, supporting them across digital marketing, creative and AI. This latest campaign marked a new step in our partnership and the first time we’d worked together on a virtual challenge fundraiser.

Breast Cancer Now runs virtual challenge events regularly, typically encouraging people to complete a distance goal over a set period. These events play an important role to encourage new supporters and create a shared sense of purpose and community.

With virtual challenges evolving since their peak during lockdown, this campaign was an opportunity to understand how the model performs now and what resonates most with audiences.

The aim for their ‘Walk 100 miles in October’ campaign was to generate as many quality sign-ups as possible, primarily through paid social. Success was measured first by lead volume, with longer-term goals around participation and funds raised.

Alongside this, Breast Cancer Now want to keep these challenges effective over time and explore how testing new channels could help introduce the campaign to new audiences.

We focused most of the budget on Meta (Facebook and Instagram), where virtual challenges have historically performed strongly. Alongside this, we set aside a larger contingency test budget for TikTok, so we could upweight spend if early performance justified it.

While Breast Cancer Now had tested TikTok previously, this campaign marked a shift in approach. Tracking was set up so sign-ups could be measured further down the funnel, not just at lead stage, giving a clearer picture of how TikTok performed beyond initial registrations.

On Meta, we prioritised broad prospecting for different locations across the UK, supported by lookalike audiences based on previous participants and remarketing to people who had opened, but not completed, the lead form. As is often the case with fundraising challenge campaigns, the cold audience performed particularly well, delivering the lowest cost per lead and the highest volume of sign-ups.

Creative was provided by Breast Cancer Now and included a mix of video and static assets. Throughout the campaign, video consistently outperformed static formats, particularly content that clearly showed what participants would receive once they signed up and started to fundraise, like branded t-shirts and bobble hats, as well as what taking part involved.

Testing showed that copy variations made relatively little difference compared to the impact of the creative itself, helping to shape recommendations for future campaigns.

Our focused test on TikTok set out to explore how virtual challenges perform on the platform. While TikTok audiences do tend to be younger, the aim wasn’t just to reach a different demographic, but to understand how well the challenge resonated with Breast Cancer Now’s target audience in a different environment.

Creative for TikTok was kept deliberately simple and platform-native. Rather than producing highly polished assets, Breast Cancer Now used short, lo-fi videos that reflected familiar TikTok formats and felt natural in-feed.

An unboxing-style video showing the challenge welcome pack performed particularly well. It was quick to produce, authentic to the platform, and helped people understand the value of taking part at a glance.

While TikTok ran on a smaller budget than Meta, performance was encouraging. Cost per lead on TikTok was £5.71, compared to £9.00 on Meta, around 36% lower.

The highest proportion of sign-ups came from the 18–24 age group, reinforcing TikTok’s role as a complementary channel and its ability to introduce the challenge to supporters Breast Cancer Now wouldn’t typically reach through Meta alone.

The test confirmed TikTok as a strong complementary channel for future virtual challenges, particularly when paired with creatives that feel authentic and recognisable.

Later in the campaign, we introduced a targeted “chaser” activity on Meta, aimed at people who had submitted a lead form but hadn’t yet set up a fundraising page.

This additional layer helped recover momentum from people who had shown interest but hadn’t completed the final step.

The campaign was live for just over four weeks ahead of the challenge launch. The final results saw:

• £1.48 million raised
• 24,544 leads generated, 37% above target
• 12,600 new Facebook Group members, 47% above target
• A successful TikTok test, building on earlier learnings and reaching a younger audience profile

Beyond these headline numbers, the campaign reinforced the role virtual challenges can still play when they’re supported by the right media mix and platform-appropriate creative. Alongside strong performance on Meta, testing TikTok helped introduce the challenge to younger audiences who are less active on Facebook, showing how these events can continue to evolve and stay relevant as audience behaviours change.

Breast Cancer Now will continue to run virtual challenge events, including their next campaign in May 2026, building on what worked well here.

This campaign has shaped how we think about virtual challenges more broadly, not as a one-size-fits-all solution, but as a flexible fundraising tool that can still deliver real value when it’s thoughtfully planned and tested.