GMMB Response to the Water Foundation: Land Trust Alliance

GMMB Response to the Water Foundation

Contact: Traci Siegel, Traci.Siegel@gmmb.com

Elevating land conservation with Land Trust Alliance

The Land Trust Alliance is a national land conservation organization, representing nearly 1,000 member land trusts. Together, they are dedicated to preserving the places people need and love, in service of land conservation across America. For the past five years, GMMB has partnered with the Alliance to conduct research and help design and launch a new digital awareness campaign: Gaining Ground — a national effort designed to elevate land conservation as a priority by engaging a younger, urban/suburban professional powerbase who, research has shown, care deeply about land conservation and are looking for ways to get more involved.

GMMB worked with the Alliance in April 2022 to launch a pilot effort during Earth Month focused on reaching this audience in eight key markets (the markets were selected based on partnering land trusts). The Alliance’s digital advertising campaign ran 4/4/22 through 4/30/22 across LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. The campaign leveraged zip code geotargeting, detailed targeting segments, and demographic indicators to narrow down an audience of prospective users.

To support the campaign, GMMB created video and static social assets as well as a 60-second mantra video that the Alliance is still using as a centerpiece for their work. GMMB continues to partner with the Alliance and is currently working to develop and launch the national kick-off of the Gaining Ground campaign in October 2023.

The Gaining Ground pilot campaign was primarily an awareness effort and exceeded campaign benchmarks across both our primary and secondary measures:

  • Primary measure: Total impressions 3.2 million (goal 1.7 million)
  • Secondary measure: Click through rate .17% (goal .07-.13%)
  • Secondary measure: Video completion rate 51.92% (goal 14.4% to 23.32%)

The creative was successful because we were able to tap into existing footage from the target land trusts and create messaging and imagery based on insights from message testing. We also used precise targeting to reach our intended audiences geographically and on the platforms they frequent.