Context
I lead digital donor acquisition and retention for a base of 466,000+ active donors on Salesforce, manage a team of four, report to the Marketing Director and own the area's P&L.
The problem
Paid channels for social causes are more fragile every year, so growth needs clear ownership, better vendors and owned data.
What I did
- Redesigned the area's structure: role map, individual ownership and meeting cadence.
- Ran competitive tenders for paid media and martech: five agency proposals with weighted scoring, closed in eight weeks.
- Made ROI a contractual condition for the first time.
- Built the roadmap to grow digital from 10% to 19.5% of new memberships.
- Set Salesforce as the single source of truth for lead tracking.
- Led campaigns such as UNHCR's 75th anniversary and Hardest Hit with HQ and the Portugal team.
The lesson
When the rented channel gets fragile, the real asset is your own data and a team that owns its numbers.
Read the full story: Meta's EU ad ban on social causes and the case for channel sovereignty
