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The Texas State Affordable Housing Corporation (TSAHC) is a self-sustaining nonprofit housing organization with a mission to give every Texan the opportunity to live in safe, decent, and affordable housing. TSAHC’s programs target the housing needs of low-income families and other underserved populations in Texas who do not have acceptable housing options through conventional financial channels.
“We’re a statewide organization operating in a huge state, but our staff is relatively small,” said Katie Claflin, TSAHC’s director of communications and development. “Consequently, we have always relied on partnerships with lenders and REALTORS® to help us spread the word about our programs and services.”
In addition to partnerships and word-of-mouth marketing, TSAHC employs both display and Google advertising that targets homebuyers, members of the National Association of REALTORS®, and lenders with messages designed to educate each group about the organization’s programs. Although Claflin believed TSAHC’s display advertising to be an excellent channel for raising awareness, she thought that the organization’s advertising efforts could be more effective.
TSAHC’s eligibility quiz yields measurable results
TSAHC’s relationship with Feathr began when a Feathr representative contacted the organization.
“The rep reached out to us after seeing some of our advertising efforts,” said Claflin. “To be totally honest, I was a bit hesitant because we get lots of solicitations, but Feathr seemed to have a professional approach that stood out to me. I was looking for an arrangement that was as user friendly as possible, and after experiencing Feathr’s demo, we knew that we wanted to sign up and work with them.”
Claflin wanted to do more in terms of display advertising and achieve measurable results with a campaign promoting the organization’s loan program eligibility quiz. “The quiz is designed to inform visitors to our website about the home buyer programs we offer,” she said. “In our Feathr campaign, we use retargeting to reach previous website visitors and steer them toward the quiz. We measure the number of people who see and respond to our ads by the number of people who take the quiz.”
The team found the platform and its analytics dashboard very accessible and appreciated the ability to run and track their campaigns from scratch. McNamara said, “We could see our strategy was effective when we saw conversions. Students would click on an ad and then submit the related forms.”
Example: display ad from TSAHC's eligibility quiz campaign.
Retargeting campaigns were the key to success
After consulting with Feathr, TSAHC decided to run retargeting campaigns. “We ran our first campaign in February, our second in April, and our third shortly thereafter,” said Laura Ross, manager of communications and development of TSAHC. “They were all retargeting campaigns focusing on people who had visited our website.”
According to Ross, working with Feathr was easy. “After we went through a bit of training, we learned how to use the platform to set up those campaigns,” she said. “It is such an easy process to start connecting with visitors to our website, and the Feathr team was very responsive to our questions.”
Feathr created two sets of four graphics: one set for TSAHC’s home-ownership programs that offer down payment assistance and another set for the organization’s mortgage credit certificate program.
“That gave us a great start,” said Ross. “Once those ads were created, we went in and tweaked them before publishing them. The entire process was very intuitive and user friendly, and Feathr provides an attractive dashboard that helps us track the performance of our efforts.”
Building upon the success of its first campaign, TSAHC plans to increase its investment in Feathr Ads.
“Now that we know how the platform works and are seeing the results we wanted, we’re very excited about future initiatives,” said Claflin.