Update September 2019
Facebook has made a major change to their Messenger policies. Starting on January 15th 2020, pages can no longer broadcast to subscribers who haven't interacted in the past 24 hours without paying for sponsored messages.
Sponsored messages are billed on an impression basis. Your ad account is charged for an impression when someone sees they have a message from your organization in their Messenger Inbox. Facebook recommends bidding $30 CPM in the US.
There's an exception for news pages, but that is restricted to pages that “primarily create journalism” — not advocacy orgs that post news stories.
Most of the tactics below can be adapted to use with peer-to-peer and broadcast messaging. The initial recruitment could be done through Facebook lead ads to capture phone numbers or through a Messenger destination ad. The first step in the Messenger flow could ask for the supporter’s phone number.
We are testing tactics that are compliant with the new rules. Email Randall at [email protected] if you would like to collaborate on tests or want to know what we learn.
The challenge
Cosecha is a non-violent movement fighting for permanent protection, dignity, and respect for the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.
In October of 2018, they planned a 65-mile pilgrimage from Grand Rapids to Lansing to demand legislative changes that would allow undocumented immigrants to get a driver’s license in Michigan.
One of Cosecha's key audiences is Spanish-speaking moms and grandmas. "These are the women who sacrifice for their family and their community. They are the people who work with others to get things done in the immigrant community,” said Alejandra Cruz, an organizer with Cosecha.
Cosecha organizers have learned that traditional online organizing tactics like petitions and broadcast emails aren't an effective method to reach these women. Over the past two years, the Cosecha team has been a leading innovator in using new tactics and channels to reach this demographic via Facebook Lead ads, Facebook Live broadcasts, WhatsApp, and peer-to-peer text messaging.
One of the ads used to recruit new supporters to engage with the page on Messenger.
People could also opt-in to Messenger broadcasts by commenting “licencias” and other keywords.
The solution
A few days before the kick-off of the pilgrimage for driver's licenses, a team from Cosecha (Christine Miranda, Patricia Murphy and Arielle Clynes) and a team from PowerLabs (Thaís Marques and Randall Smith) met to discuss the opportunity of using Facebook Messenger as a channel to recruit people on Facebook and move them to offline action.
Our theory was that if we offered women an opportunity to receive behind the scenes Spanish-language updates on the pilgrimage, they would opt-in to receive messages from us and would want to be involved in the campaign going forward.
We thought that Messenger was an ideal channel, both because our audience is on the platform and because Messenger allows us to combine broadcast messages with two-way conversations to move people to deeper levels of engagement at scale.
To build our audience, we ran ads that featured Gema Lowe, a Cosecha leader in Grand Rapids, describing the journey she was about to undertake. We also broadcasted updates on the walk using Facebook Live and asked people to comment on the post with a keyword. After the viewers had commented with the keyword, they received a Facebook message from Gema asking them if they wanted to receive updates during the pilgrimage.
We then sent people daily text and video updates via Messenger and asked people to share the content with their friends.
The results
Over 250 people opted-in to receive messages from the Facebook page in five days.
30% of people told us they wanted to be involved in local organizing.
20% of people said they wanted to donate.
90%+ of broadcast messages were opened. The average advocacy organization has an email open rate of 16%.
The average click-through rate was 24%. The average advocacy organization has an email click-through rate of 2.5%.
Lessons learned
We had more people say they wanted to be involved in local organizing than we expected. Next time, we’ll have several in-person events on the calendar so that we can funnel people to opportunities to connect with others in their community, learn more about the movement and join a team soon after their first interaction.
20% of people said they wanted to donate, but we received very few gifts. We are following up with those who said they wanted to give in order for us to try to learn why people didn't contribute and, ultimately, help them complete their donation.
People shared, unexpectedly, heartfelt and personal stories in their replies to our auto-response messages and broadcasts. This helped us identify the community members who resonated with our messaging and cause. In the future, we are considering making it more clear which messages are broadcast versus those from an individual to not mislead recipients.
Many people replied to the broadcast messages with references to God. We set up keywords to automatically tag those who said "Dios bendiga" (God bless you) so we could send them content related to religion. For example, we offered to send them a video of a pastor speaking at one of the stops on the pilgrimage. 71% of the recipients asked to see the video, and 58% of them said they watched the video. The two-way nature of Messenger and the feature set of Messenger bot platforms allow for segmentation at scale based on natural language replies in a way that isn’t feasible with broadcast email channels.
Learn more about Cosecha’s digital strategy
Watch this webinar recording to learn the digital strategy behind the largest immigrant-led day of action in a generation.
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