The impact of people-first creative for Wycliffe

In July 2025 we launched an always-on donor acquisition campaign for Wycliffe Bible Translators. Wycliffe exists to translate the Bible into the languages that have never had it, and their goal for paid social media was simple; growing a base of regular givers against clear targets we set together.

We built the campaign to run continuously rather than in bursts, which meant it had to keep finding new people month after month. Rolled into the campaign was the creative Wycliffe had available at the time: some videos, a few statics and a carousel.

Early performance was positive, cost per donation settled comfortably inside target and volume held while the creative was still new to the people seeing it. However, over subsequent months, the same campaign running on the same budget began returning progressively less. The price of creative fatigue was clear in the account with the cost per donation increasing by as much as 67%.

The price of creative fatigue

We made the adjustments we could, broadening audiences and testing new campaign structures, and with each time the numbers lifted for a week or two before settling back to roughly where they had been; the signature of creative hitting fatigue. Meta had shown the existing assets to everybody it felt would donate and didn’t know how to find more people.

Rebuilding the campaign was never going to fix this; we needed to change what was in the ad. Every asset we used had been built to explain the mission accurately and respectfully, which is a very different job from making somebody pause mid-scroll and feel something.

So we went and asked the donors

The answer turned out to be sitting in Wycliffe’s own database. Their donation form carries a free-text field asking supporters why they have chosen to give, and it has been collecting responses for years.

Our partners at Wycliffe handed over thousands of unique responses. We read and categorised every one, deliberately separating the underlying motivation from whatever happened to trigger the gift on the day, because a Christmas appeal explains the timing of a donation but not the reason behind it. Alongside that we ran user testing with a considered split of existing donors and people who had shown interest in Wycliffe but had never given.

The finding was unambiguous, with a personal connection to a specific Wycliffe worker as the single largest motivation, named by around a quarter of all donors. It sat ahead of belief in the cause of Bible translation and a long way ahead of trust in Wycliffe as an organisation.

People give to people

What donors wrote about was not translation methodology or the scale of the need. They named someone they had met at church, someone they had followed for years, someone whose family they prayed for by name. The mission mattered enormously to them, but it had reached them through a face.

That reframed the creative brief. The task was no longer to explain the work more clearly or more movingly, it was to introduce people to the person doing the work and let the relationship do what it has always done for this charity. The strongest asset available to us was not a better explanation of the mission, it was somebody real, talking straight to the viewer.

Putting the people doing the work on camera

We asked Wycliffe to go and film their own people with a brief that pushed deliberately against production value. We asked for people face to camera, using their own words, filmed simply and without a crew.

The Wycliffe team delivered, with films from their colleagues across the globe, leveraging cuts in both native language (and English subtitles) as well as in English; all to allow us the opportunity to test. Every variant went into the account to allow for algorithmic testing from the start. Each cut was judged on click-through rate and donations rather than on how we felt it looked.