You probably noticed the various poppy applications on Facebook in the run up to Armistice Day. On seeing these, the question on my mind was: aside from enabling people to put a poppy on their Facebook profile, what else did they do for the cause? Well, the answer is: quite a lot.
A few weeks ago we highlighted how charity donations site JustGiving benefited from Facebook, and the Poppy appeal has achieved similar results – albeit in a slightly more roundabout way. While the British Legion’s main homepage received less than 2% of its traffic from Facebook last week, the micro-site it set up specifically for the Poppy appeal, poppy.org.uk, received over one in ten of its visits from the social network

The two most popular sites visited after poppy.org.uk (which together received over half of all downstream visits) were the British Legion’s homepage and poppe.poppy.org.uk, the section of the Poppy site that is used to collect donations. In addition, 94% of visitors that came to the British Legion site from poppy.org.uk last week were new visitors – i.e. the poppy site was delivering fresh traffic to the British Legion, rather than simply returning visitors

I think that this example nicely illustrates the advantages of setting up campaign specific micro-sites or affiliates to drive traffic. In this case, it seems that the main benefit was to attract younger visitors: 31% of visitors to poppy.org.uk were aged 18-34, compared with just 18% for the British Legion homepage.