How A Nonprofit Grew High-Quality Leads By 877 and Increased Engagement By
337% With A Paid Social Strategy
An experienced social ads team can enable your campaigns to perform their best by prioritizing data-driven decision-making with your marketing efforts, leading to overall business growth.
Education Resource Strategies (ERS)
Education Resource Strategies (ERS) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to transforming how school systems organize resources to support every student’s success. Headquartered in Massachusetts, ERS partners with district, school, and state leaders nationwide to develop equitable, sustainable strategies for budgeting, staffing, and scheduling. With over 20 years of experience and deep expertise in education finance and strategic planning, ERS provides actionable tools, data-driven insights, and hands-on guidance. Their mission is to ensure all students attend schools where they can thrive.
- 20+ years in business
- Partnered with 100+ districts & states
- 5,000,000 students & teachers served
The Challenge: Expand digital reach through paid social advertising
ERS was looking for a partner to help them expand their digital reach through paid social advertising. While they had experience running LinkedIn ads, they had never used Meta and struggled to build effective audiences or track performance. With limited internal bandwidth and no clear roadmap for social success, they needed expert support to align their strategy with organizational goals.
They turned to Pure Visibility to take the lead on social advertising, leveraging our existing partnership on Google Ads to ensure cohesive messaging, proper tracking, and campaigns that connect with the right audiences across platforms.
Solidified Tracking & KPIs
Set up conversion tracking & engagement metrics.
Audience Development & Testing
Built persona-based audiences and refined them through ongoing testing.
Diversified Ad Formats & Creative
Used tailored formats and creative to match content with user intent.
Our Approach: Creating a sustainable, goal-oriented social advertising strategy
Building a Foundation for Full-Funnel Social Success
Our approach focused on creating a sustainable, goal-oriented social advertising strategy that seamlessly complemented ERS’s existing Google Ads campaigns. We prioritized foundational improvements while layering in ongoing testing and optimization.
Implementing Proper Tracking and Goal Alignment:
We implemented comprehensive tracking to ensure that conversions from social campaigns were measured consistently with ERS’s Google Ads goals, capturing key actions such as PDF downloads, Excel downloads, newsletter sign-ups, and contact form submissions. We also established engagement KPIs to measure success beyond last-click attribution.
Testing Audiences, Formats, and Messaging:
We built out persona-based audiences and continuously refined them through A/B testing, expansion, and pruning based on performance. We paired these audiences with a mix of creative formats—including single image and carousel ads, document download formats, newsletter lead gen ads, and even direct messaging—to ensure we delivered the right content to the right users at the right time.
Driving Engagement and Remarketing Opportunities:
As campaigns progressed, we focused heavily on building and nurturing engaged audiences. These lists became valuable assets for both ongoing Meta campaigns and Google Ads remarketing efforts, helping ERS stay top of mind for their target decision-makers throughout their research journey.
Results
Results: Expanding Reach, Boosting Engagement, and Driving Lead Growth
Since launching paid social with Pure Visibility, ERS has seen significant growth in site traffic, engagement, and lead generation across both Meta and LinkedIn. By refining audiences, optimizing creative formats, and aligning campaigns with ERS’s broader goals, we’ve built a strong foundation for sustained performance and long-term list growth.
Meta campaign engagement rose from 4.58% to over 20%, a 337% improvement, while LinkedIn engagement nearly doubled from 10.94% to 21.5%. This reflects the success of ongoing audience refinement, creative testing, and content alignment.
Paid social has generated 877 high-quality leads, including 240 newsletter sign-ups and 637 content downloads. These efforts have significantly expanded ERS’s email list and supported their mission of distributing thought leadership to decision-makers in education.These results reflect a steadily improving strategy rooted in testing, iteration, and alignment with ERS’s mission to connect the right tools and content with education leaders nationwide.
Key Outcomes Include:
- 24,800+ sessions from Meta ads, with an average engagement rate of 20.02%, a 337% increase from the initial 4.58% when campaigns first launched
- 2,500+ sessions from LinkedIn ads, with an average engagement rate of 21.5%, up 96.5% from the original 10.94%
- 877 total leads generated across platforms, including 240 newsletter sign-ups and 637 gated content downloads
- 800 Meta leads (231 newsletter sign-ups, 569 content downloads) contributing significantly to ERS’s growing email list
- 77 LinkedIn leads, primarily driven by document download campaigns
- 5,112 social actions on LinkedIn and 326 on Meta, highlighting strong engagement and visibility within the target audience
Through careful testing, strategic alignment, and platform-specific tactics, we’ve helped ERS turn social advertising into a powerful extension of their paid media strategy—growing reach, engagement, and leads within a highly targeted audience.
You can learn more about our Paid Social and Paid Search services here.
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