Dans la rue

Dans la rue supports young people in precarious situations in Montréal. The campaign launches 23 September 2026 against a $100,000 goal, with a donated media ecosystem running alongside it and no digital history whatsoever: no account, no pixel, no baseline.

The audience is also tight on money: 67% of 18 to 40 year-olds say they cannot afford to give (Léger for Institut Mallet, 2025, n=1,000).

The draft results model had digital delivering between 170% and 219% of the entire campaign goal. That is a promise nobody can keep, and it is the number a client remembers eighteen months later.

We rebuilt the results model from scratch in code and reconciled it against the deck's own slides. Four independent defects.

The media budget was being split between one-time and monthly gifts at ratios that wandered from 75 / 25 to 60 / 40 with no rationale, when in practice it is one buy, one landing page and two buttons, and the same visits produce both outcomes. Two of nine rows reconciled to nothing. The results slide's budget curve disagreed with the plan's in four of six windows, invisibly, because both still totalled $64,000. And cash was mixed with annualized value at two different horizons, neither of them written down.

Underneath all of it sat a 4.8% to 6.9% visit-to-gift rate, which is warm branded-traffic territory, when cold paid social to a donation page runs 0.5% to 2%.

We also rebuilt the campaign calendar, which the first version had missed entirely: the 5 October Quebec general election, where a cause ad reads as political and the right move is to go dark; La Nuit des sans-abri on 16 October, the one night of the year Quebec media leads on the subject; Mardi je donne on 1 December; the Guignolée des médias on 3 December, where the correct play is not to hard-ask that day but to ride the warmed frame on 4 to 6 December; and 29 to 31 December, when a tenth of annual Canadian giving happens and the tax receipt expires.

The concentrated scenario runs in fall 2026, puts 5% of the budget in giving season and reaches a frequency of 3.33 in its heaviest window. The spread scenario runs to 31 December 2027, puts 52% of the budget in giving season and holds frequency at 1.06.

A $64,000 plan that is 94% conversion, because the donated media covers awareness and an abribus has no button on it. A corrected three-case results model. And a defensible planning line replacing the old claim: digital contributes roughly 13% to 27% of the $100,000 in the campaign year, with the rest carried by mail, phone, events and major gifts.

One result survived every assumption. The longer scenario's living monthly donor base is 2.0 times the short one's in all three conversion cases, because that ratio comes from the calendar structure and not from media efficiency. The dollar totals collapse as you get prudent; the ratio does not move. That, and not a dollar total, is what the recommendation rests on.