Earthjustice: Raising Money to Defend the Earth

Since kicking off their work with Earthjustice in July 2024, Precision has exceeded their yearly fundraising goal and are more than halfway to their new advocate goal for the fiscal year ending in July 2025. More than doubling last year’s efforts in just 6 months.

Across all objectives — Fundraising, Advocacy, and Awareness — Earthjustice’s ads ran on Meta, Google Search, Google Display, Popsycle, Bing, Civic Shout, Daily Kos, and LinkedIn across 34 total campaigns.

In the months leading up to the U.S. presidential election in November 2024, Earthjustice and Precision held a brainstorm to conceive new fundraising strategies to deploy for each potential presidential outcome. 

Coming out of those strategy sessions, Precision used the weeks leading up to, and then immediately following the election, to test out new strategies across creative assets, targeted audiences, platforms, and messaging. Through updated creative that called out the dangers that a second Trump administration would pose for our environment, and a focus on engaging previous donors, advocates who had yet to give, and prospective donors with similar online behaviors to active donor list, we were able to leverage the insights gained from our post-election testing period to raise 3X the amount of revenue as November 2023.  

To further invest in reaching our fundraising goals, Precision allocated two-thirds of Earthjustice’s Q4 paid media budget for fundraising campaigns — including substantial last-minute, incremental increases during Giving Week and End-Of-Year to help reach and convert new donor prospects.​

Following a successful November post-election rapid response push, December saw our highest volume of fundraising revenue to date as we launched Giving Tuesday and End of Year (EOY) campaigns — raising nearly 70% of the total year to date revenue. 

Our paid ads also helped scale sustainer donations for Earthjustice, generating over 1,000 monthly givers and tens of thousands in recurring gifts. 

In preparation for the busiest time of year in fundraising, Precision leveraged proven tactics and optimized Earthjustice’s campaigns based on the insights from their October and November performance to launch new ads leading into Giving Tuesday and the December fundraising period.

In addition to relying on data from previous campaigns, Precision also introduced two new strategies: Bing Ads for paid search, and weekly content creation for Meta ads, to increase opportunities to maximize our return on ad spend (ROAS). Across all platforms, we saw huge returns on our investment, but Bing ads played a key role in our End of Year success, with a 537% percent return on ad spend. 

In addition to exceeding our revenue goals, Precision also helped introduce Earthjustice to new audiences, converting 919 first time donors, who contributed 39% of all revenue generated during end of year.

The campaigns Precision ran for Earthjustice from July 22 through the end of 2024, exceeded their entire yearlong fundraising goal. But money isn’t everything: Both the advocacy and awareness campaigns also led to high-performing results.

The total amount raised is also 199% more than was raised last year during the first 6 months of the fiscal year.

To optimize our advocacy performance, Precision updated its campaign strategy on Meta to include native Lead Generation ads in an effort to increase conversion rates and bring on new advocates and supporters. This generated around 80,000 actions and 70,000 new advocates across channels in Q2 alone. These results also came at a cost-effective $2.53 CPNA (Cost Per New Acquisition) across the full campaign to date. 

By developing a slightly different platform strategy across each objective — focusing on boosted posts and display advertising for awareness, leveraging lead gen and fixed costs acquisition platforms for awareness, and doubling down on paid search for fundraising — we were able to exceed our quarterly goals in every category.

Immediately following the 2024 presidential election, Precision shifted our creative strategy from focusing on Earthjustice’s current environmental cases to highlighting how Project 2025 and Donald Trump’s re-election would threaten our climate progress and more specifically — how Earthjustice plans to fight back. This strategy paid off across all objectives, and were the highest-performing topics for awareness and engagement as well. In particular, awareness campaigns through Q4 produced a 28.95% engagement rate.

As we enter this new era of a second Trump administration, Precision is retaining a degree of necessary flexibility for rapid-response moments in order to help Earthjustice be prepared when reacting to pressing current events. Together, they will continue to leverage high-performing content to raise money and urge advocates to fight back against Trump’s threats to the environment.