Colo Media
Capabilities

Advocacy · Nonprofit · Political

Digital strategy, paid media, search, SEO, email, websites and donation infrastructure for advocacy organizations, nonprofits, issue campaigns, committees and candidates. Where the ask is a gift, a signature, a signup or a vote, and the money being spent belongs to somebody who believed in you.

Scope a ProgramWhat we do ↓
01 — Who this is for
Mission-driven
organizations
and campaigns

Nobody here is buying
a product. They are
choosing a side.

A homeowner who needs a plumber already wants the thing. An advocacy organization is asking someone to part with money, attention, or a vote in exchange for nothing they can hold. That changes what the creative has to do, what the landing page has to answer, and what counts as a conversion worth paying for.

It also changes the budget. In commercial work the money is the client's own and a bad quarter is recoverable. Here the money came from donors or members, most programs run against a hard date, and the reporting has to survive a board, a treasurer, or in some cases a federal filing. We build for that from the first conversation rather than retrofitting it in October.

We scale the compliance work to what you are actually running. A donor acquisition program for a 501(c)(3) and a candidate-naming independent expenditure carry very different obligations, and only one of them needs a daily trafficking log. Plenty of vendors price the heaviest version into every engagement. We do not.

  • 501(c)(3) Nonprofits
  • 501(c)(4) Advocacy
  • Healthcare & Patient Advocacy
  • Faith-Based & Community
  • Issue Campaigns
  • Ballot Measures
  • Coalitions
  • PACs & Committees
  • Candidates
02 — Capabilities
01
Digital Strategy & Channel Planning
Objective definition, audience and geography modeling, channel allocation, budget pacing against your calendar, and a written measurement plan agreed before a dollar moves.
02
Google Search Ads
Brand defense, category and issue terms, conquest, and logistics terms. The one channel where targeting restrictions barely bite, because intent replaces targeting, and the only one with reliably positive fundraising return.
03
Facebook & Instagram (Meta) Ads
Donor and list acquisition, retargeting of engaged supporters, creative volume and structured testing. Best cost per acquired name of any paid channel in the benchmark data, by a wide margin.
04
YouTube & Video
In-stream and in-feed video for awareness in low-recognition categories, with disclosure requirements and disclaimer placement handled at the asset level rather than left to the platform field.
05
CTV, OTT & Streaming Audio
Connected TV across accepting platforms plus streaming audio, which still draws a small share of political budgets relative to the time audiences spend with it. The clearest arbitrage available for awareness work.
06
Broadcast & Cable Planning and Buying
Market and daypart planning, station negotiation, lowest-unit-charge windows where they apply, trafficking and post-buy reconciliation. Including honest advice on when broadcast is the wrong buy.
07
Out-of-Home & Outdoor
Billboards, digital OOH, transit and place-based inventory. Market selection against the audience you actually need rather than raw traffic counts, vendor negotiation, production, and proof-of-posting.
08
SEO & Programmatic SEO
Technical and editorial SEO for organizational sites, plus data-driven page generation at scale: district, state, program, condition or measure-level pages built from a validated dataset rather than thin permutations of one paragraph.
09
Websites & Conversion Infrastructure
Organization sites, campaign and coalition hubs, program and service-finder pages, list capture built to be matchable, SMS consent, event and volunteer flows, GA4 and server-side tracking.
10
Email Strategy & Program Management
Welcome and onboarding series, cultivation and appeal calendars, segmentation and suppression rules, list hygiene, and subject line and send-time testing. The channel that turns an acquired name into a donor, and the one most organizations run on instinct.
11
Email Infrastructure & Deliverability
Platform selection and migration, SPF, DKIM and DMARC authentication, domain warming, inbox placement diagnosis, re-engagement and sunset policy. Unglamorous, and the reason an otherwise good program quietly stops reaching anyone.
12
Donation & Recurring Giving Programs
Donation flow design and processor integration, one-time to recurring conversion, lapsed-donor reactivation, and reporting measured on cost per donor and lifetime value rather than on impressions.
13
Creative Production & Testing
Static, motion and video variants produced at testing volume rather than at committee-approval volume, with a documented provenance log and disclosure of any synthetic element.
14
Compliance, Ad Ops & Competitive Monitoring
Disclaimer construction per entity and jurisdiction, platform verification management, timestamped trafficking logs where reporting obligations exist, and standing surveillance of the Meta and Google ad libraries for anyone working the same issue.
03 — Selected work
What we have
actually done

Three engagements, and
what each one taught us.

Below are real client engagements, not case study theatre. Each box describes what the work was, what we were responsible for, and the lesson that carried forward into how we run programs now.

Client names are withheld where the engagement is ongoing or the category is sensitive, and we do not publish performance figures we cannot source. In a scoping conversation we will walk you through specifics, including the parts that did not work.

Client engagement · Healthcare advocacy
Awareness and engagement for patient advocacy nonprofits.

The work Paid search and paid social built around the moment someone is actually looking for help, rather than around the organization's own vocabulary. Content and landing architecture organized by condition and by question, with conversion tracking wired to the actions the organization cares about rather than to page views.

What it taught us Advocacy organizations tend to write for their board and their funders. Search demand is written by patients and families, in language nobody in the building uses. Closing that gap is usually worth more than any bidding change.

Paid Search · Paid Social · SEO · Landing Pages · Measurement
Client engagement · Donation cultivation
Donor acquisition and giving program for a pregnancy resource center.

The work A multi-channel donor cultivation program for a mission-driven nonprofit operating in a contested space: acquisition through search and paid social, a rebuilt donation flow, and a cultivation path designed to convert one-time givers into recurring support.

What it taught us Measured on cost per donor and recurring conversion rate rather than reach, because the first gift is not the outcome. It also taught us how much platform policy fluency a values-based category actually requires before a single ad ships.

Donor Acquisition · Donation Flow · Recurring Giving · Paid Media
Track record · Commercial & institutional
Over $1M in annual ad spend managed across institutions and operators.

The work Five-plus years managing paid media for universities, multi-location businesses and regional service companies. Large-budget accountability, weekly optimization cadence, and reporting written so a board or a director can read it without a translator.

Why it matters here This is where the operational discipline comes from. Advocacy and political work adds urgency and a compliance layer; it does not change the underlying craft of buying media well and proving what it did.

Google Ads · Meta · Reporting · Budget Management

We do not publish invented performance figures. If a number appears in a proposal, it comes from a named third-party benchmark or from your own account, and it will say which. Anything else is a vendor asking you to trust arithmetic they will not show you.

04 — Team

Every client works
directly with us.

No account coordinators, no handoffs, no junior buyer learning on your budget. The people who plan the strategy are the people who execute it, and the people who answer when you call.

Matthew Shaughnessy
Founder & Lead Strategist
Matthew Shaughnessy
Five-plus years managing over $1M in annual ad spend for universities, multi-location operators, healthcare advocacy nonprofits and donor cultivation programs. Builds the strategy, the channel plan and the measurement framework, and stays on the account rather than handing it off after the pitch.
Every client relationship runs through Matthew directly, including the uncomfortable conversations about what a budget can and cannot actually achieve.
Strategy · Media Planning · Measurement
Rene Ramlow
Paid Media & Account Management
Rene Ramlow
Came to Colo Media from a Washington, D.C. policy think tank, and brings something most media buyers do not have: firsthand experience of how issue organizations actually operate. How a message gets approved, what a board will and will not sign off on, and why the language a policy shop uses internally is almost never the language its audience is searching for.
Runs paid media execution across Google and Meta, campaign and budget management, and the weekly reporting cadence. The person keeping the account moving between strategy reviews.
Paid Media · Campaign Management · Reporting
05 — Commercial terms
Flat fee.
Media at cost.
Scaled compliance.

Media is placed at cost, held in a separate ledger, and reconciled monthly. Below meaningful scale we charge a flat fee for a defined scope rather than a percentage of spend, because a percentage fee on a small buy produces an agency that is paid to spend rather than paid to perform.

Political engagements are prepaid in full, fees and media, before anything runs. That is a compliance posture as much as a collections one: an incorporated vendor extending unpaid credit to a federal committee can be characterized as a prohibited corporate in-kind contribution. Nonprofit and advocacy engagements follow standard commercial terms.

One side per race. Federal coordination rules reach common vendors and former personnel on a 120-day lookback, so in any electoral contest we take the candidate or the outside group, never both. We say this before an engagement rather than discovering it mid-cycle.

We are not counsel. Organizations with regulatory exposure should have compliance counsel. Our job is to not create exposure through sloppy execution, to catch a problem before it ships, and to hand your counsel clean documentation.

06 — Contact

Tell us the ask,
the date, and
the budget.

What you need someone to do, when you need them to have done it, and what you actually have to spend. Those three answers determine everything else. Send them over and we will come back with a channel plan, the arithmetic behind it, and a straight read on what the budget can and cannot achieve.

Email Matthew directly
Phone540-632-1734
OfficesRoanoke and Richmond, Virginia
WorkingNationally

No intake form and no contact queue. Questions go straight to Matthew and get answered by Matthew.

Send an Email