No matter the season or what’s in the news, there are always people in need of medical resources. But nonprofits that provide those resources receive most of their donations during moments of increased public attention, such as natural disasters.
Once the public attention wanes, said Tony Morain, VP of communications at humanitarian aid organization Direct Relief, “so does interest in what we’re doing.”
Direct Relief specifically focuses on bringing medical aid, including doctors, clinics and medicine, to people and communities facing poverty. The company has earned a reputation for being “highly effective,” according to Morain, but part of that efficacy comes from putting minimal spend toward advertising and raising awareness.
Staying top of mind year-round for audiences who are inclined to make charitable contributions is an ongoing challenge for Direct Relief. But a recent campaign it ran in partnership with end-to-end programmatic platform Nexxen proved that the organization could increase its marketing effectiveness by targeting – and retargeting – likely donors, as well as past donors, even when there are no major disasters in the headlines.
In late 2025, Direct Relief launched a campaign to bring more awareness to its goals, specifically within the LA market, and to remind people that medical aid is always a necessity. The audiences Nexxen built specifically for the campaign using first-party data outperformed the off-the-shelf third-party audiences available in Nexxen’s DSP. And it gave Direct Relief a new model for more consistent fundraising throughout the entire calendar year.
High-value audiences
But before Direct Relief could create this new marketing model, it needed some help identifying the untapped resources it had at its disposal, rather than waiting to capitalize on unpredictable news coverage.
Direct Relief contracted independent ad agency Kindling Media to guide the campaign. Kindling’s founder and CEO, Jennifer Ziman, had previously worked with Direct Relief on a pro-bono campaign in 2022 that promoted the group’s relief efforts for the war in Ukraine.
Kindling Media selected Nexxen as its tech partner due to its targeting capabilities and the fact that a brand-lift study was included as part of the campaign proposal.
The campaign ran from mid-November through the end of January, which is a crucial stretch of time for nonprofits, Ziman said, thanks to Giving Tuesday and year-end taxes, which often have a major impact on donations.
However, the holiday season can be a double-edged sword for nonprofits looking for donations, said Oscar Rondon, Nexxen’s VP of data and measurement solutions. Yes, consumers are in more of a “giving mindset,” he said, but they’re also worried about holidays and gift buying, and are often “watching their budgets.”
The natural starting point, then, was seeking out audiences who had already expressed interest in Direct Relief’s mission or donated to the org in the past.
But Direct Relief’s first-party data could only get so close to those previous donors. Its data set provided ZIP codes and geographic regions in LA associated with past donations, but it couldn’t target at the individual level, said Morain.
Right on target
Working with Nexxen gave Direct Relief access to more granular audience targeting.
The campaign targeted preexisting audiences from third-party providers like TransUnion and Comscore that are available through Nexxen’s DSP, as well as custom audiences built on a combination of Nexxen’s and Direct Relief’s first-party data.
Nexxen curated audience segments based on Direct Relief’s ZIP code data. It then matched that data against its ID graph, called Nexxen Discovery, to retarget Direct Relief’s previous donors at the individual level. It also sought out new donors by targeting audiences who were reading articles about the impact of charitable donations or accessing websites of similar organizations, like the Red Cross.
Nexxen put its pixel on all of the campaign’s CTV ads and on the Direct Relief site so it was able to retarget people who were exposed to the ads across social media. It was important for Direct Relief to strike what Morain called the “Goldilocks number of impressions” – just enough that people remembered them, but not so many that their audience became fatigued.
The happy medium, Rondon reported, was about four impressions.
The campaign initially targeted members of higher-income households who were over 35 as a proxy for high lifetime value, Kindling Media’s Ziman added. But as the campaign went on, Kindling refined it to focus more on women, who were responding in greater numbers to a PSA from comedian and actress Jane Lynch that was an early element of the campaign.
Featuring a famous comedian in its ads was also a departure from Direct Relief’s previous marketing efforts, said Morain, and the creative change seemed to resonate with audiences in a way that disaster-focused campaigns did not.
“You go to our homepage,” he said, “it’s Ebola, hurricanes, wildfires. We’re not that funny.”
Much of the campaign focused on CTV, Ziman said, and performed particularly well on Peacock. But one of the biggest takeaways was about the audience, rather than the channel.
Nexxen’s audience segments drove 1,453 visitors to Direct Relief’s site, outperforming the third-party audiences, which drove 1,236.
Nexxen’s Rondon chalked up the comparative success of the company’s own audience segments to having “fresher data” than the third-party audiences.
Third-party data sets are often “dated,” Rondon said, and aren’t receiving a constant supply of the latest data. Nexxen, on the other hand, gets up to two or three terabytes of audience consumption information every day, he said.
By the end of the campaign, Direct Relief saw a 9.4% increase in donors and a 7.9% increase in revenue growth from the previous year.
The campaign was “a really good example of what’s possible,” said Rondon, when the “plumbing is right.”
