A regional NGO's donor acquisition costs had soared, and internal performance audits revealed major inefficiencies in how campaigns were being run. The marketing team was passionate and well-intentioned, but results weren't matching investment. Cost per acquired donor kept climbing, and the board was raising concerns about ROI, sustainability, and whether the staff had the capacity to manage digital fundraising effectively.
After a previous engagement with a digital agency ended in disappointment, the leadership team was hesitant to bring in outside help again. They didn't want someone to take over their campaigns, push their team aside, or treat them like they didn't understand their own donors. What they needed wasn't a takeover. They needed a partner who could quietly strengthen their internal capacity, correct course, and leave their team stronger rather than sidelined.
Pholus was brought in under strict conditions: no campaign ownership, no full takeover, and no sweeping restructuring. Our role was to observe, train, and advise while preserving team morale and organizational culture. What we found was a classic pattern: overproduction without optimization, effort without framework, and a team working harder instead of smarter.
This case study is relevant if you're facing:
Rising donor acquisition costs despite increased marketing activity and spend. Your organization is investing more in digital advertising, email campaigns, and outreach efforts, but the cost to acquire each new donor keeps climbing. You're getting volume but not efficiency, and the board or funders are questioning whether the current approach is sustainable or whether the team has the expertise to manage donor acquisition at scale.
Internal marketing teams that are overwhelmed but resistant to outside agencies taking control. Your staff is passionate about the mission and works incredibly hard, but they lack structured frameworks for testing, optimization, and performance analysis. Previous experiences with agencies left them feeling sidelined, criticized, or replaced rather than supported. They need help but won't accept it if it comes with judgment or loss of ownership.
Campaign performance that's inconsistent or driven by aesthetics rather than data. Your team launches dozens of ad variations based on what looks good or feels right, but there's no clear testing framework, no consistent optimization process, and no way to distinguish signal from noise. Ad spend gets distributed across too many creatives with no strategic focus, and performance becomes reactive rather than proactive.
Messaging that's technically accurate but doesn't compel donor action. Your fundraising materials are written by subject matter experts who know the issue deeply, but the copy doesn't emotionally connect with potential donors or clearly communicate why their contribution matters. The content is informative but not persuasive, and conversion rates suffer despite strong mission alignment and genuine impact.
Board or funder pressure to improve efficiency without clear guidance on how. Stakeholders see the numbers and know something needs to change, but they can't pinpoint whether the problem is team capacity, platform performance, messaging strategy, or just bad luck. You need an outside perspective that can diagnose the real issues and provide actionable solutions without creating defensiveness or disruption.
We led structured training sessions tailored to the team's current knowledge level and capacity constraints. Rather than start with criticism or diagnostics, we began by building trust and positioning ourselves as facilitators of internal clarity, not external experts imposing solutions. The training covered foundational principles of media buying, how platform algorithms reward clarity and consistency, the anatomy of successful ad campaigns from message testing to creative fatigue, and how to structure controlled experiments with proper budgets, timelines, and goals. The sessions emphasized frameworks over formulas so staff could adapt the knowledge to their own workflows rather than feeling constrained by rigid agency rules.
We conducted ad inventory triage to identify what was draining budget without delivering results. Working with the staff, we cleaned up their ad inventory by asking which creatives had statistically significant data, which were actively underperforming but still consuming budget, and which messages were driving engagement but not conversions. Using these insights, we co-developed an internal optimization framework the staff could follow week to week. The approach emphasized consolidation, focused testing, and removal of noise rather than creating more variations and hoping something worked.
We provided messaging refinement and storytelling coaching to improve donor connection and conversion. Beyond the technical optimization, we noticed that much of the organization's donor messaging lacked clarity or emotional resonance. In some cases, copy was written by subject matter experts rather than communicators, making it technically accurate but not compelling. We coached the team in story-first messaging and mission-aligned clarity, helping them connect day-to-day work with donor values. The creatives became more human and more effective, driving both engagement and action.
We transferred ownership and capability rather than creating dependency on external support. Within six weeks of implementing these changes, the organization saw measurable cost reduction and improved performance. But the more meaningful outcome was cultural: the internal marketing team regained confidence. They were no longer overwhelmed by dashboards or unsure what to do when performance dipped. They had a playbook, a process, and most importantly, ownership. There was no campaign rescue, no performance scapegoating, just a quiet reset that left them stronger and more capable than we found them.
The full case study details the training methodology we used to build internal capacity without creating dependency, the ad inventory triage process that identified waste and focused effort, and the messaging refinement framework that improved donor connection and conversion rates.
If your donor acquisition costs are rising despite increased effort, your internal team needs support but resists agencies taking control, or your messaging is accurate but not persuasive, Pholus provides capacity-building, optimization frameworks, and storytelling guidance that strengthens your team rather than replacing them.
This expertise also applies when you're rebuilding confidence after a failed agency relationship, need to improve campaign performance without disrupting operations, or want to develop sustainable internal capabilities that outlast any consulting engagement.