Objective

UNICEF USA had a clear ambition to grow its donor base by bringing in younger supporters. But the real problem was not awareness. Many potential donors already knew UNICEF. The challenge was earning attention, trust, and action from an audience that was overwhelmed by crisis, skeptical of institutions, and more motivated by participation than passive giving. A standard donor-acquisition strategy would not get there. UNICEF needed to understand what was actually blocking younger supporters from engaging and how to design a path from attention to action to sustained support.

Strategy

The work combined stakeholder interviews, social listening, syndicated audience profiling, qualitative research, persona development, and quantitative segmentation. The strategic move was to expand the frame from donor acquisition to supporter engagement. For this audience, "doing good" was already a broad identity system: reading, sharing, advocating, volunteering, fundraising, and donating. Donation was one endpoint in a larger participation ecosystem, not the only one. We developed a working persona to make the target audience human and plannable, then mapped how a potential supporter moved from encountering an issue to exploring organizations to engaging to extending that engagement over time. Quantitative segmentation identified the highest-potential growth audiences: people more aligned with giving behavior and most responsive to proof, authenticity, and genuine impact.

Results

The work gave UNICEF USA a more actionable growth strategy. Not "ask younger people to donate harder," but meet the right audiences with the right proof, participation opportunities, and impact story at the moments when they are most open to action. It clarified which audiences to prioritize, why potential supporters were not converting, what emotional and practical barriers needed to be addressed, and how participation beyond donation could build future donor value.