Personalizing your Growth Strategy by Platform and Audience
By understanding how user motivations differed by platform, Meta transformed simple social interactions into impactful fundraisers, driving engagement and growth.
User motivation refers to the underlying reasons, desires, or needs that drive individuals to take specific actions within a product or service. It can include emotional, psychological, or social factors that influence how and why users engage with features, complete tasks, or interact with content. Understanding user motivation helps in designing experiences that resonate with users, encouraging them to perform desired actions, such as signing up, making a purchase, or sharing content.
Consider the challenge at Meta — where Connie Chen was charged with developing a growth strategy across shared platforms that have similar users but very different engagement patterns.
This is an excellent example of how recognizing user motivations can turn small interactions into significant outcomes, such as charitable donations. By leveraging the power of personalization, virality, and community connections, these platforms transformed routine user activities—like birthdays and social sharing—into opportunities for growth.
Facebook’s Fundraiser Funnel: Tapping Into User Motivation
Facebook’s approach to fundraisers is built around a deep understanding of why users engage with their platform. A key motivation for why people use Facebook today is celebrating and acknowledging birthdays.
The funnel looks something like this:
1.”It’s your birthday” banner: When a user's birthday arrives, Facebook prompts them with a suggestion to create a fundraiser.
2. Create fundraiser flow: In just three clicks, users can create a fundraiser. Facebook suggests five nonprofits based on previous preferences or social ties and lets users search for more, pre-generates a shareable message, and allows users to easily invite their friends.
By simplifying the process, Facebook ensures that even users with limited experience in fundraising can create a campaign with minimal effort.
However, Facebook found that this funnel was most effective for a small segment of users, about 0.5-1%. This level of adoption was deemed very low when comparing with competitors.
Tactic #1: Find a relevant reason & timing
Everyone has a birthday, and one of the primary reasons people go to Facebook is to see their friend’s birthdays. Encouraging users to “donate” their birthday to a good cause resonated with users. This focus on timing (a few days before someone’s birthday) and jumping on a social norm (where friends contribute to a birthday) resulted in the most popular charitable donation product!
Tactic #2: Make it easy to draw attention to the fundraiser
Many users created fundraisers, but not all their friends knew about it because of lack of notifications, feed posts, etc. Connie and her team learned that most people needed to see the fundraiser more than once before donating. By providing organizers multiple avenues (invites, sharing, posts) and reminding them with nudges, it was easy to draw attention to the fundraiser.
Tactic #3: Help motivate past fundraiser creators by sharing their previous impact
Facebook found that the most successful fundraiser creators were also successful in the past. However, the messaging to these creators were all the same. Connie and her team updated promotions and messaging to remind fundraiser creators of their previous impact (ex: “You raised $512 last year!”), which made them feel good and motivated them to create again.
These solutions led 40% of fundraisers to have at least 1 donor. There are now at least 1 million fundraisers created per year on Facebook, with $1.5B raised (~1-2% of US charity) and 50% came from birthdays.
Instagram’s Virality and Fundraiser Growth
While Facebook's strategy focused on simplifying the process and making the impact clear to motivate many users to create fundraisers, Instagram's approach to fundraisers is driven by virality and the platform's inherent social sharing features. This is heavily influenced by a subsection of top creators that are driving virality on the platform - 1% of users are responsible for 55% of all impressions.
The core funnel was updated to the below to ultimately double donations generated through Instagram.
1. Create a fundraiser: The process of setting up a fundraiser on Instagram is streamlined, just like on Facebook.
2. Share to your story: Once a fundraiser is created, Instagram encourages users to share it directly to their story, allowing followers to engage with it immediately.
3. Add to your profile: If you see a fundraiser you want to support, you can add to your profile as well and friends will be notified.
Tactic #1: Encourage top creators to create fundraisers with meaningful and topical causes
Instagram as a whole has a few users who generate the most impressions (ex: 1% of users are responsible for 55% of all impressions), and this principle applied to fundraisers as well. By aligning fundraisers with topical events—such as political causes or social movements—Instagram was able to drive higher engagement for fundraisers with deep, personal relevance.
Tactic #2: Focus on personal connection
Instagram’s data showed that the closer a user was to the person creating the fundraiser, the more likely they were to donate. Fundraisers often reflect deeply personal causes, and Instagram understood that users would be more likely to contribute to a friend’s campaign rather than one from a distant acquaintance.
Tactic #3: Make it easy to share
As part of the fundraiser creation process, Instagram introduced a feature where the person who starts the fundraiser can immediately post it to their story with one click. This minimized the effort required to spread awareness and created a viral loop where fundraisers could gain more visibility through stories and social networks.
Tactic #4: Post-donation engagement
Instagram found that user motivation doesn’t end after making a donation. To extend the lifecycle of a donation, Instagram added a feature that allows users to add their donation to their profile and receive notifications. This increased the visibility of the cause and encouraged more donations, as users' followers could now see which causes were meaningful to them, driving additional awareness and engagement.
These four tactics, especially post-donation engagement, doubled donations generated through Instagram.
The Power of Personalization and Virality
Both Facebook and Instagram have harnessed key consumer motivations—personal connection, social influence, and ease of use—to increase fundraiser success rates. By simplifying the donation process and making it more personal and impactful, Facebook increased engagement among users who already felt a connection to a cause. Meanwhile, Instagram focused on virality and social influence, encouraging users to spread awareness within their networks.
In both cases, the platforms successfully leveraged user behavior to drive action and growth. This is an excellent example of how personalization of a growth tactic for each audience (Instagram vs Facebook) can work well.
By understanding why users take action and building product features that align with these motivations, both platforms were able to turn a simple interaction into a powerful tool for growth.