The problem: traffic without attribution
Roots Forward plants trees in degraded forest zones across three continents. They have 14 staff, a communications team of two — Adaeze and her colleague Femi — and a development director, Clara, who owns fundraising strategy.
In autumn 2025, Roots Forward ran their largest year-end giving campaign ever: six channels, five weeks, one donation landing page. They generated 38,000 clicks across the campaign. They raised $214,000 — a strong result for an organization their size.
But Clara had one persistent problem: she couldn’t tell which channels drove donations.
Their analytics showed 38,000 clicks. Their donation processor showed 1,240 completed donations. The connection between those two numbers was, in Clara’s words, “a black box.”
The root cause was UTM inconsistency. Adaeze was creating links manually for each channel — email newsletters, Instagram bio links, LinkedIn posts, a podcast sponsorship, partner organization newsletters, and a direct mail QR code. Each link used slightly different UTM strings. Many had no UTM parameters at all.
The result: 34% of donation sessions arrived in Google Analytics as (direct) / (none). Nobody knew if that was the podcast, the partner newsletters, or something else entirely.
“We were making decisions about where to invest next year based on vibes, not data. That felt wrong for an organization that talks about evidence-based impact.” — Clara Osei, Development Director, Roots Forward
Setting up for the spring campaign
Roots Forward started using Shortifi in early February 2026, about six weeks before their Earth Month fundraising push.
Building the source vocabulary
Adaeze ran a retrospective on every channel Roots Forward had used in the previous 18 months. She found 11 distinct sources that should map to six real channels. She created the Shortifi vocabulary in one session:
- email (their own newsletter, Mailchimp-managed)
- partner-email (partner organization newsletters)
- instagram (bio link and story links)
- linkedin (organic posts)
- podcast (sponsorship mid-rolls with a vanity URL)
- directmail (QR codes on physical mailers)
One campaign, every channel
For the Earth Month campaign, Adaeze created a single Shortifi campaign called Earth Month 2026. Inside it, she generated one link per channel per week. A five-week campaign across six channels meant 30 links, all created in about 40 minutes.
Every link redirected to the same donation page. Every link had clean, normalized UTM parameters. The podcast sponsor got a branded short link (sho.fi/roots-earth) that resolved with utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio&utm_campaign=earth-month-2026 — no raw UTM string visible to listeners.
The QR code problem (and how they solved it)
Direct mail had always been a measurement blind spot. Roots Forward sent 2,400 physical mailers to lapsed donors. Previously, the QR code pointed directly to their donation page with no tracking. This time it pointed to a Shortifi short link.
When the mailers landed (tracked by postmark date), Femi could see the click spike in real time on the Shortifi dashboard. For the first time, they had concrete data that the mailer was being opened and acted upon.
Results: Earth Month 2026
The campaign ran from April 1–30, 2026. Here’s what clean attribution revealed:
| Channel | Clicks | Donations | Conversion rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Email (own newsletter) | 6,200 | 410 | 6.6% |
| Partner email | 4,100 | 180 | 4.4% |
| 11,400 | 190 | 1.7% | |
| 3,300 | 140 | 4.2% | |
| Podcast | 980 | 88 | 9.0% |
| Direct mail | 720 | 95 | 13.2% |
| Total | 26,700 | 1,103 | 4.1% |
The insight that changed their strategy
Instagram drove the most clicks by a wide margin — nearly three times any other channel. But its conversion rate was 1.7%, the lowest of any channel. Direct mail, by contrast, drove 720 clicks and converted at 13.2%.
They had been underinvesting in direct mail because they assumed it was unmeasurable and therefore unaccountable. The actual data told a different story.
“We’ve been spending creative energy on Instagram because it feels modern and the follower count is visible. But our lapsed donor list converts at eight times the rate. That changes the budget conversation entirely.” — Clara Osei
For their summer campaign, Roots Forward shifted 20% of their social media production budget toward expanding the direct mail list. Clara projects this reallocation will increase total donations by 25–30% on the same overall marketing spend.
“We’re a small team. We can’t afford to guess where to spend our energy. Now we don’t have to.”