Awana

The situation

Awana has a 75-year legacy and a devoted family of supporters. It also had the problem every legacy ministry knows: the people who already loved the mission were carrying the growth, and you can only ask the same room so many times. New donors, the kind who had never given and barely knew the name, were not arriving on their own.

The mandate was simple to say and slow to build: stop renting this year's revenue from the existing file and start creating future demand.

What we built

Dedicated paid media, run as one connected system instead of scattered campaigns. Story-led ads built to be felt, not just clicked. Content offers and lead magnets that gave real value away before any ask. Email journeys that treated a new subscriber like a future partner in the mission, not a name to be converted by Friday. Conversion tools and landing pages that kept the promise every ad made.

Brand work and performance work, deliberately multiplied. The stories built familiarity and trust with people who weren't ready yet. The campaigns were there, clean and clear, the moment they were.

What happened

New donors grew 66 percent in twelve months. Those brand-new donors gave more than a million dollars. Email lead generation, the future donor file, grew 330 percent while subscriber-to-donor conversion improved from 4.8 to 6.1 percent, which is the part worth reading twice: the audience got bigger and warmer at once. Branded search rose roughly a quarter year over year, and the blended cost of a new donor fell. Not from asking the faithful harder. From becoming known and loved by people the ministry had never met.