Reaching High-Intent Donors at Scale in a Privacy-First Environment

The British Red Cross is one of the UK’s leading humanitarian charities, supporting people in crisis both domestically and internationally. As part of the global International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, the organisation delivers vital assistance during emergencies, conflicts, natural disasters, and public health crises.

In the UK, the British Red Cross focuses on providing practical and emotional support to individuals and communities in need – from emergency response and refugee support to first aid training and tackling loneliness and social isolation.

Operating in a rapidly changing humanitarian landscape, the British Red Cross needed to ensure their fundraising was as agile as their relief efforts. The key obstacles included:

• Capturing Real-Time Urgency: In a fast-moving news cycle, standard targeting often lags behind unfolding events. The charity needed to bridge this gap, reaching potential donors exactly when their receptivity to the cause was highest.
• Pinpointing High-Value Intent: Casting a wide net often leads to wasted spend on people who are unlikely to convert. The challenge was to identify and target only those with genuine humanitarian intent, driving efficient acquisitions.

In partnership with The Kite Factory, Adlook deployed a privacy-first activation designed to identify and engage high-value donor segments without reliance on third-party cookies.

To achieve this, we:

• Activated custom contextual targeting using Adlook’s proprietary LLM-based models to identify content environments aligned with charitable intent and humanitarian relevance.

• Leveraged Smart Audiences, enabling the creation of scalable audience segments derived from open-web content analysis and behavioural signals.

• Combined these solutions with 1st-party retargeting to reinforce consideration and drive donation-focused actions.

• Applied continuous in-flight optimisation, ensuring budgets were dynamically shifted toward the most efficient placements and audience segments.

This integrated approach allowed the British Red Cross to respond to evolving world events while maintaining consistency, relevance, and efficiency across the campaign lifecycle.

The campaign delivered strong performance across both brand and performance metrics:

• -24% CPA vs. benchmark on the acquisition campaign, driving more efficient donations.
• +12.7% Brand Lift in an aided ad recall study, confirming increased awareness among exposed users.
• +36% higher conversion rate for Adlook-exposed users vs. non-exposed users on the acquisition campaign.
• +44% increase in users with 2+ sessions among Adlook-exposed audiences, indicating stronger engagement and intent.

Custom analytics further demonstrated the incremental value of Adlook exposure compared to organic traffic, validating the effectiveness of the targeting strategy.

This activation highlights the potential of privacy-first targeting to support mission-driven organisations at scale. By combining contextual intelligence with advanced audience modelling, the British Red Cross is well positioned to further evolve its digital fundraising strategy – responding faster to emerging crises while continuing to drive efficient donor acquisition.

Future campaigns offer the opportunity to deepen testing across audience segments, expand measurement of incremental impact, and further optimise performance across the full funnel.