Social Media and Social Norming

On Facebook and Instagram, the best tool we have to evaluate the efficacy of these ads is Facebook’s brand lift study tool. The tool uses online surveys at the end of the campaign. It gathers responses from people exposed to the ads as well as those unexposed and then measures the difference.

Results

Our campaign increased the number of women who believed that Community Trusts were beneficial for connecting people who care about improving their financial health in Los Angeles by +2.4 points, meaning that when comparing the control group who did not see the ads to the test group who did, 16,800 more women from the test group believe in the potential of Community Trusts.

In Atlanta and Houston, ad recall was very high, but there wasn’t any perceptible shift in attitude towards Community Trusts leaving us curious about the difference in resonance between Spanish-speaking women in L.A. and English-speaking women in Houston and Atlanta.

From a communications standpoint, key performance indicators matched our benchmarks for similar campaigns. Overall, women visiting the Community Trust landing page spent an average of 2.3 minutes on the site and of those that visited the page, 6% clicked to continue learning more. Interest was highest in Atlanta where 7.1% of page visitors clicked to join the Community Trust email list for more information and to learn how to join a group. This conversion was 2x above our benchmark. While these typical campaign performance metrics demonstrate an engaging ad series, did we help foster an uptick in social acceptance for cooperative savings groups?

As we continue to experiment and learn about using social media as a tool for driving positive changes in knowledge, attitude and behavior, we continued to build on our key takeaways that will inform our next campaigns.

Key Takeaways

Testimonials perform best every time. As with CARE’s campaigns to reduce COVID vaccine hesitancy featuring CARE staff sharing their personal stories, the most engaging ad, driving the most likes, shares and comments, featured a testimonial.

For future campaigns, we might consider targeting women interested in “entrepreneurship” or “small business” in addition to geographic and equity-focused targeting. From the results, it was clear that different messaging would resonate with different age groups. For example, emphasizing the community aspect – “connecting with others in your area” – may be an effective outreach strategy, especially for women 25-44. Conversely, for women 18-24 emphasizing that Community Trusts focus on equity and the ways cooperative savings can financially empower women who have a hard time getting a loan from a traditional bank may resonate more.

Most importantly, this campaign helped to validate some of CARE’s previous research related to introducing the VSLA concept in the United States. Significant shifts in attitude, knowledge and behavior related to cooperative savings is needed for the VSLA concept to work in the United States. This campaign made us wonder if we should consider a two-to-five-year education and social norm-rooted campaign to ensure Community Trusts in the U.S. are on track to experience the same kind of success we’ve seen in other parts of the world.

“Our partnership with Meta for this targeted experiment as well as our mixed results encourage and excite me as they ultimately help improve our theory of change and our ability to build economic resilience for women.”
– Ryan Shepard, AVP, US Programs, CARE USA