Groundswell Fund

Fighting for Collective Liberation

With a powerful model for change, Groundswell Fund is proving that “when a foundation is run by and for those who come out of grassroots organizing, the giving looks different.” Across reproductive justice and nearly every major social issue, the Groundswell Fund team is supporting intersectional organizing and durable movements for progress. Teal is proud to support their work.

Teal Media is a woman-owned full-service creative agency based in Washington, DC. We offer UX research, web design & development, brand strategy, and creative support to mission-driven and nonprofit partners. We believe purposeful design can transform organizations, inspire action, and enable progress.

Social Media Growth

From March 2024 to August 2024, Groundswell Fund partnered with Teal Media on a six-month social media retainer to elevate their presence and engagement across platforms. Through strategic planning, thoughtful copywriting, eye-catching design, and ongoing performance optimization, the retainer resulted in:

Sustaining a Mission-Driven Presence

After an initial period of growth, Groundswell Fund re-engaged Teal Media from June 2025 through April 2026  to provide continued support during a time of internal transition. With shifting team capacity and priorities, our approach focused on maintaining a consistent, values-driven presence across social channels through a streamlined, “lights-on” model.

During this engagement, Teal provided ongoing strategic guidance and content creation to ensure continuity, adapt messaging in real time, and continue elevating and movement moments.

By focusing on consistency over volume, this “lights-on” approach ensured Groundswell maintained an active presence while prioritizing meaningful engagement over reach. With a reduced publishing cadence, overall visibility decreased, but those who did engage were more deeply connected to the content, resulting in a 16% increase in LinkedIn engagement rate per post.

Groundswell was reaching and resonating with an engaged, loyal audience—while still continuing to grow, with +2,248 net new followers. Even at a smaller scale, this approach allowed Groundswell to stay connected to their core community while steadily expanding their reach.

Paid Media Performance

THE CHALLENGE

In managing Groundswell’s Google Grant, the core challenge was to drive spend while also improving cost efficiency, reducing cost-per-click (CPC) without sacrificing overall performance. Maintaining (or growing) traffic and impression volume was especially challenging in a time where strategy had to adapt to align with Groundswell’s evolving organizational priorities.

The account needed to become more resilient and flexible, ensuring campaigns could accurately reflect updated program messaging and continue to drive high-quality user engagement.

THE SOLUTION

At the start of the year, we shifted away from optimizing toward basic page views and instead implemented more meaningful GA4 engagement-based conversions. These included Engaged Sessions which optimizes to >10s on page, >50% scroll, and 2nd page visits.  While this strategic shift did risk lower overall traffic, and we were ready to shift back if the impact was too great, this change allowed campaigns to optimize toward higher-quality traffic rather than volume alone, improving downstream engagement.

Additionally, to address high CPCs and improve targeting precision, we restructured the account into three distinct campaign types:

• Brand Protection = To keep pace with organizational changes, we continuously refreshed ad copy and keyword targeting to reflect updated program priorities. This ensured that campaigns remained accurate, timely, and aligned with user intent, even as Groundswell’s focus evolved.
• Brand Generic = Targeted broader industry terms related to philanthropy, funds, and grantmaking to expand reach.
• Grant Seekers = Focused on mission-aligned, program-specific keywords (e.g., grassroots funding, birth justice) to attract highly relevant audiences.

We recognized that launching these new, segmented campaigns would require a ramp-up period to build spend and generate meaningful performance insights. During this time, we closely monitored performance and proactively optimized key elements such as refining keyword targeting to ensure spend remained efficient and aligned with our goals.

Through a combination of improved conversion tracking, refined campaign structure, and ongoing optimization, Teal Media significantly increased the efficiency and impact of Groundswell Fund’s Google Grants program quarter-over-quarter:

To keep pace with internal organizational changes, we continuously refreshed ad copy and keyword targeting to reflect updated program priorities. This ensured that campaigns remained accurate, timely, and aligned with user intent, even as Groundswell’s focus evolved.

Working with a client so dedicated to equity and justice has been incredibly rewarding, and we’re proud to have supported Groundswell Fund in amplifying their mission.