Chickens probably have more sayings devoted to them than any other animal. Or person.
“Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.”
“Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”
When my son was four, his favorite was “Why did the chicken cross the road?”
I never answered that one correctly. His answers were…definitely from a four-year-old boy.
But the one that’s been on my mind lately is this: “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”
It’s the kind of advice that’s so obvious it almost feels boring. And yet, it keeps showing up for a reason. Especially when I look at how digital ads tend to work in fundraising.
Most fundraisers and marketers approach ads in a pretty reasonable way. You put real thought into one creative. You choose the image carefully. You write the copy, tweak the headline, decide on the call to action, and bring all your platform knowledge to bear. Then you launch it and watch what happens.
As results come in, you start optimizing. Maybe you swap a sad face for a happy one and clicks jump. Maybe pairing the image with copy that starts as a question improves engagement. You make small, smart adjustments based on what you’re seeing — not because any single change is magic, but because this is what thoughtful practitioners do.
Often, it works. So you keep going. You optimize a little more. And when it looks like it’s performing, you add more budget.
That’s usually the moment things quietly start to go sideways.
At a certain point, an ad is just…done. Not bad. Not broken. Just finished. It’s as good as it’s going to get.
When you keep pushing budget into it anyway, you’re often not just plateauing results, you’re hurting them. People start seeing the same message again and again. Frequency climbs. Familiarity turns into fatigue. And when that happens, it’s not just the ad people get tired of. Sometimes it’s your organization they get annoyed at seeing, too.
This is when you might expect me to say, “You need to try something new,” and maybe you’re already anxious about what you assume I’ll suggest: A new platform. A new tool. A new system to learn when no one has extra time or energy.
But fear not! That’s not what I’m suggesting.
Thankfully, it’s way easier than that.
In many cases, the problem isn’t that you’re doing the wrong thing. It’s that you’re thinking too narrowly about the right thing. You’ve put all your eggs in one basket — one message, one angle, one way of talking about something — and you’ve asked it to do all the work.
One way I like to think about this is to imagine a donor’s heart like a middle school locker.
When I was in middle school, remembering my locker combination was way harder than it should’ve been. When I first got it, I was convinced I’d forget it and get locked out. I was right. It happened more times than my parents were happy about.
But imagine if that locker had half a dozen different combinations that would open it. That would’ve been incredibly handy — especially on days when I just needed my geography textbook and didn’t have time to stand there wondering if I’d mixed up the clockwise/counterclockwise pattern.
Believe it or not, that’s a lot like your donor base.
There isn’t one perfect combination that opens everyone’s heart. There are lots of them. Different motivations, different emotional entry points, different ways people connect, even when they all care deeply about the same mission.
Fundraising often assumes there’s one right message and the job is to find it and optimize it. In reality, almost no message works for everyone.
The good news is this doesn’t require creating a bunch of new offers or dramatically increasing your workload. You can take the same offer and simply talk about it differently.
Let’s say you have an offer that’s clearly working: “$5.21 provides a Thanksgiving meal.” That’s solid. Keep it. The mistake would be asking that single framing to resonate with every donor.
You could also talk about that same offer as an invitation into community: “Join a community that is caring for and helping our neighbors this holiday season.”
Or you might focus on the overall, eventual outcome: “It’s impossible to learn new skills and apply for a job when you’re hungry. Be the reason he gets a living wage job.”
For some donors, timing matters most: “Thanksgiving is in two days. Give meals today!”
Others might have stability and long-term impact unlock their heart: “Your monthly gift will provide Thanksgiving meals and also ensures that people can find help and hope here even after the holidays are over.”
Same mission.
Same offer.
Different combinations.
By saying multiple things, you give your organization multiple chances to connect.
You don’t even have to wait until your first ad is worn out to do this. You can start by running a few different “families” of ads from the beginning. Depending on your budget, you may not be able to test every angle at once and that’s fine. Start with a little variety, optimize what you’re running, then layer in another perspective. Repeat as you go.
This approach is usually healthier than riding one ad until everyone is exhausted and then scrambling to replace it.
This is also why, when we run digital ads at Oneicity, we try to talk about the same thing multiple ways. Not because donors are fickle (although…), and not because we’re chasing tricks. It’s simply a recognition that people don’t all open the locker the same way.
Like everything in fundraising, your mileage may vary. But if your ads feel like they’re suddenly tanking or slowly losing steam, it might not be because you chose the wrong message.It might be because you asked one message to carry too much weight.
Want to talk about optimizing ads, chickens, or anything else? Email howdy@oneicity.com.
Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash
