CryptoAidIsrael: Maximizing Ongoing 10/7 Relief Through Targeted Paid Ads

To start, I’d like to share how proud I am of the community of Web3 companies that joined together to raise over $250,000 of humanitarian aid so far for victims and their families of the 10/7 attack in Israel. Addressable joined CAI to volunteer our human and technical resources to secure aid from Web3 crypto holders.

CAI was the first charity enabling crypto holders to donate crypto to support 10/7 attack relief. We forward the aid to organizations (Natal, Lev Echad) which buy and deliver essentials to help victims and their families heal and rebuild.

In our first update, we explained how CAI grew early donations by tracking donor trends using on-chain insights. Addressable is proud to be an early CAI member and to facilitate humanitarian aid to our fellow citizens in need by volunteering our time and expertise to this crucial cause. 

In this update, we highlight CAI’s challenge of attracting more donations amid fading momentum after the initial shock of the 10/7 attack.

Adapting strategy to continue attracting aid: More active, targeted relief outreach

As the first weeks passed after the attack, Addressable monitored CAI’s aid trends and remained deeply committed to ensuring we could continue securing crypto-based relief as long as the need persists.

Entering late October, our team became discouraged as news media organic buzz and PR through news and social media were decreasingly available and effective due to the shock of 10/7 fading for many people. Our volunteers weighed how to adapt our November strategy to revive much needed aid by better leveraging our data and expertise.

With 4 weeks of data, we determined that the best ongoing strategy was to use early donor insights to craft and run paid social media ads to ideal potential donors, those whose behavior most resembles early donors.

While initial donations came from empathetic and reactive donors reached through PR, organic social networks and posts, we knew a wider network of potential donors who care were out there that we still had an opportunity to reach.

Defining the ideal donor

Before we could run paid social ads, the team had to define the ideal donor profile off of which to base the ad creative and copy, as well as the targeting parameters. To build a persona, our team worked with other volunteer experts, Shamir Ozery, former head of Web3 at Algorand, and David Azaraf, Director of Growth at INX, to study the on-chain and digital footprints of initial donors and base the persona around their behavior and profiles.

The result was “Adam,” whose psychographic, demographic, social and web channel behavior were inputs from our team to build an ideal Addressable “Adam” audience. Adams are crypto owners living in the U.S., France, Hong Kong or Israel who identify with pro-Israel messaging. They hold crypto, including stablecoins, and are 28-45 years old.

Reaching ideal donors: Paid social ads to audience based on early donors

Then we used this persona profile to select parameters to build a Twitter campaign audience of Adams.

Shamir and David also used the insights and persona to draft ideal ad creative and copy to appeal to ideal donors’ psychographic and demographic profiles. 

Surprised to see our Twitter ads rejected: Overcoming ads rejected due to political ad policy

The initial ads, while carefully crafted to appeal to the ideal donor persona and having charitable intent, were unexpectedly rejected for war-focused content Twitter deemed too “political.” We quickly re-designed the ads to be more “neutral” for policy compliance, while still tailored to appeal to ideal potential donors. 

The ads were approved and we could start the campaign in November.

We soon had a new hurdle. Due to war-time tension, the ads were quickly flooded with anti-Israel comments. They performed poorly until we disabled commenting. Our key learning was to block comments upfront in these contexts.

Results: Every $1 of paid ads resulted in over $2 of donations

We started the campaign on November 19th and used automated optimization to constantly improve the audience and performance over several days. This resulted in increased traffic and over a dozen more donations with a 200% return on ad spend (ROAS). This means that for every $1 spent on paid ads, we attracted over $2 of crypto aid. 

The robust traffic increase and reduced CPC using precisely targeted paid social ads was a stark improvement from before the paid campaign started. Adams proved to be an elusive target at first, but after the first optimization, CPC dropped rapidly to more efficiently attract relief from other ideal donors empathetic to the cause. 

We were very relieved to see more donations from the campaign in late November and December, which we again rushed to victims and families. We hope CAI has served as a beacon of hope and community to inspire others to donate or help however they can. If you would like to donate crypto, just click here: https://cryptoaidisrael.com/.

We’ll continue the Twitter campaign and constantly optimize the audience to maximize aid for as long as the need persists. We’ll also soon integrate banner ad campaigns which our partners at www.eskimi.com will donate. We're proud that our on-chain measurement and optimization tech can make a difference at this urgent time of need.