More than 5 billion dollars have been donated through fundraisers on Facebook and Instagram, of which 2 billion since February 2020. Facebook has announced, adding that these donations have been made in favor of non-profit organizations and personal causes
According to data from Facebook's ad library, NGOs are among the biggest spenders on Facebook ads.
The largest investor in Facebook ads, on social issues, elections or politics, in Italy, is
Save the Children Italia
which, since Facebook makes these data available, from 15 April 2019 to 20 March 2020, has invested 2.6 million euros in advertisements on the platform.
DataMediaHub analyzed the advertising investments of NGOs and non-profit organizations and their presence on Facebook.
The research confirmed that Save the Children Italy is the largest investor in Facebook ads.
Over half a million euros in the last ninety days.
UNICEF Italia
and
Action Aid Italia
follow
.
Both above 100 thousand euros of advertising investments in the last quarter.
In most cases, these are 'micro-targeting', advertisements for which relatively little unitary investment is made to target different and relatively small audiences depending on the communication objective.
The advertising investments on Facebook by Save the Children Italy, whose campaigns are both photos and videos, are mainly aimed at raising funds and obtaining donations.
The mix of Action Aid Italia is more varied with campaigns, also in this case both photos and videos, aimed both at obtaining donations and at raising awareness of various social issues, rather than promoting the launch of their own humanitarian and social initiatives.
The same goes for UNICEF Italy.
Overall, the top eleven NGOs by level of ad spend invested more than 1.1 million euros in campaigns on Facebook in the last quarter.
To have a term of comparison, in the same time frame Amazon has invested just over 100 thousand euros in ads aimed at Italians on Facebook.
What is the return in terms of involvement of the target audience for the associations?
ANSA and DataMediaHub analyzed the fan pages of the organizations in the last quarter.
As for the number of followers in first place is Doctors Without Borders.
The NGO has more followers than all the others combined.
More than eleven million.
Emergency follows, albeit at a very great distance.
The organization founded by Gino Strada and his wife exceeds one million followers.
In third place, Oxfam Italia, just over 900 thousand followers.
There is therefore no correlation between the number of followers and the level of advertising investment on Facebook.
NGOs post relatively little on Facebook.
They range from an average of 1.71 posts / day for Oxfam Italia, to 0.46 posts per day, or about one post every two days on average, for Amref Health Africa Italia.
A fairly low publication frequency overall.
Entering the qualitative aspects it emerges that the level of interaction, and therefore of involvement by people, is low.
Doctors Without Borders gets less than 120,000 interactions in three months.
And in fact it has an interaction rate, or engagement rate, of 0.02%.
One of the lowest.
They don't do much better than others.
They range from a 0.26% rate of Amnesty International Italia to 0.01% of Oxfam Italia.
Basically, our analysis shows that NGOs on Facebook advertise but do not communicate and do not activate relationships of value.