For many charities, legacy giving represents their single largest long-term income opportunity. But getting there requires proving the proposition works, before you can invest at scale.
Concern Worldwide had developed a new legacy giving concept and wanted to test it through paid social – not just to generate leads, but to understand what messaging resonated, which audiences responded, and what a viable cost per lead looked like. We worked with their team to design a campaign that could answer those questions cleanly.
About Concern Worldwide
Concern Worldwide is an international humanitarian organisation working to end extreme poverty, responding to emergencies and running long-term development programmes in some of the world’s most crisis-affected places. We’ve worked with Concern across paid social, search, and display since 2018, supporting the growth of their paid digital presence. This campaign marked their first foray into legacy lead generation on Meta.
A new proposition with no paid benchmark and a competitive cost challenge
Concern’s legacy giving programme was newly developed, which meant there was no existing data to guide expectations – no benchmark cost per lead, no proven creative angles, no tested audiences. The campaign needed to establish all of those things while also delivering enough leads to justify future investment.
The timing added complexity. Concern’s brand awareness in Britain is lower than many other international development charities, and that tends to push up costs on Meta, particularly for an age-targeted campaign reaching people who might be considering a gift in their will.
Running during Free Wills Month, when every legacy-focused charity is competing for the same attention, would have made proving the proposition even harder.
Choosing the right moment and building the right framework
The first strategic decision was timing. Rather than launching during Free Wills Month, we worked with the Concern team to schedule the campaign in November and December, a quieter period in the legacy giving market that would keep auction costs down and give us cleaner data, away from peak competition.
To further reduce costs, we used Meta’s on-platform lead generation forms rather than directing people to an external landing page. This approach consistently delivers lower CPMs and acquisition costs, and allowed us to connect leads directly to Concern’s CRM via a Zapier and Dotdigital integration, feeding them into a bespoke email stewardship journey designed to move people from interest to pledge.
We tested three creative angles including Concern’s new “One Choice” legacy proposition across seven audience groups, using Meta’s dynamic creative setup to run both variables within the same campaign without building a large and unwieldy ad matrix.
Optimisations were phased deliberately, refining creative first, then targeting, to separate meaningful signals from early noise.
Weekly calls with the Concern team kept activity aligned and created space to plan ahead for future phases.
718 leads and a clear case for scaling
The campaign generated 718 leads at a CPL the Concern team were happy with.
CPMs were in line with legacy campaigns we run for clients with significantly stronger brand recognition. This directly addressed one of the campaign’s core uncertainties and helped build internal confidence in Meta as a viable channel for legacy activity.
The creative testing produced a standout finding: the “One” messaging delivered much lower CPLs than other angles, giving Concern’s internal team clear validation of a proposition they had invested in developing.
Those findings gave Concern everything they needed to make the case for continued investment. Phase Two followed in March 2026, testing the same proposition during Free Wills Month to understand performance in a more competitive environment. A third phase is planned for Winter 2027, building on the strong results this period delivered in the original campaign.
“Platypus is a long-standing partner of Concern already supporting us across a number of campaigns and we trusted that they could explore and deliver our first legacies Meta campaign,” said Fia Parry, Senior Legacy Marketing Executive and Lionel Riviere, Senior Digital Fundraising Executive.
“The team took the time to understand our brand new approach to legacies and proactively suggested how to adapt our legacy proposition onto Meta-friendly formats.”
“For the two rounds of campaign across 2025 and 2026, the team was brilliant at making sure everything went smoothly, from setup to campaign reporting. They were key to identifying best performing audiences and creative angles. Looking forward to running our next lead gen campaign!”
