The Challenge

A concept experiential marketing product showed promise in conversion potential but struggled to attract enough visitors to hit acquisition and ROI targets.

Key Problems to Solve:

  • Product-market fit: Original product positioning wasn't resonating with target audience segments.
  • Channel and media efficiency: To hit ROI targets, paid media had no room for waste.
  • Sustainable CAC and payback: Acquisition costs were not sustainable.
  • LTV and retention: Post-acquisition work was needed to activate and retain new donors.
  • Efficiency at scale: Product needed to scale up without a big increase in growth team headcount.
  • Cross-functional execution: GTM strategy required alignment across the growth, engineering, data, lifecycle marketing and external vendors.

Growth Strategies & Initiatives

I designed a lean, scalable growth model that combined user-centered design, rapid experimentation, first-party data activation and ongoing conversion rate optimization to scale acquisitions by ~100% compound annual growth (CAGR) and maintained CAC and LTV targets for 6 consecutive years.

Establish Product-Market Fit

Leveraged product marketing tactics to revise product positioning, core messaging and initial GTM materials to resonate with target market segments.

  • Conducted positioning audit to understand gaps and opportunities in the product story with target segments
  • Developed new, benefit-driven messaging and go-to-market resources and re-launched
  • Tested for organic response using owned channels to validate market fit before scaling up
Outcome: Updated positioning and core messaging showed major increases in KPIs, validating hypothesis.

Integrated Channel Strategy

Tested a wide channel mix, then doubled down on top performers and cut under-performers to minimize waste. Designed a repeatable GTM strategy that enabled quick scaling.

  • Leveraged community growth loops on paid social to improve ROAS and decrease CAC
  • Designed attribution models to understand the impact of multi-channel interactions
Outcome: Lean, repeatable GTM strategy that provided a baseline success rate while allowing ongoing experimentation and optimization in unique markets.

Built GTM Tools for Cost Efficiency

Rather than locking in expensive GTM software and technology tools, I created assets in-house to maintain cost effiency at scale.

  • Built a bespoke event registration platform that served over 1 million unique users
  • Created and maintained required digital assets (web, social, email, CRM)
  • Expanded from live events into digital events with new 0-1 products that expanded reach
  • Built and maintained a custom iOS app to deliver experiential media to event visitors
Outcome: Technology costs stayed flat even as live event volume scaled 10x, from 20 per year to 250 per year.

Established a Culture of Experimentation

Implemented agile-style experimentation sprints with the growth marketing team aligned to 4-6 week event promotion windows.

  • Implemented a Hypothesize - Test - Iterate workflow with the team
  • Leveraged ICE (impact, confidence, ease) framework to prioritize tests
  • Tested widely and quickly across every touchpoint of the acquisition and activation journeys, driving constant improvement
Outcome: 75% decrease in CAC from team formation to year 4, maintained performance in the face of increasing media costs in year 5-6.

Performance Media and Conversion Rate Optimization

Created a performance media engine that enabled the rapid scaling of the product line by delivering consistent community engagement at experiential events.

  • Optimized ad creative, targeting and segmentation through continual experimentation
  • Leveraged first-party data to improve paid media effectiveness, including LTV modeling to target high-value segments
  • Drove steady improvement in the efficiency of a $1m annual media budget
Outcome: 1.7m visitors to live events with high customer satisfaction ratings.

Data-driven Insights Pipelines

Created data pipelines between key systems to improve marketing effectiveness.

  • Leveraged first-party data for LTV models, enabling better targeting and more accurate ROI estimates
  • Used AI to uncover new insights (unstructured learning), drive KPI improvement (reinforcement learning) and power experimentation (structured learning)
  • Used advertising and CRM data to project highest ROI markets, leading to more effective event schedules
Outcome: Steady delivery of actionable insights to the teams that needed them.

Activation, Retention & Expansion Strategy

Collaborated with lifecycle marketing and fundraising to impact retention and revenue expansion.

  • Implemented personalized onboarding and activation journeys
  • Studied impacts of acquisition experiments on other lifecycle stages to maximize LTV, not just CAC
  • Leveraged community growth loops as a defensibility strategy (multiple engaged community members less likely to churn)
Outcome: 20% increase in LTV vs. other acquisition channels, hundreds of new major donor leads added to the revenue expansion fundraising pipeline

The Results

100% acquisition CAGR

Over six years, while maintaining CAC efficiency.

Sustainable CAC

And Payback Period, meeting fundraising efficiency and ROI targets.

$200m+ in net-new lifetime revenue

Highest-growth donor acquisition product in the organization over the time period.

1.7m live event visitors

Mass brand awareness growth lifted acquisition metrics across multiple channels.

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