media
Insights · Case study
Five weeks of Meta ads, close to a year's carer quota: the Just Foster ledger.
Fostering is a quota business. A national agency's entire year hangs on how many qualified foster carers it approves, and most agencies' advertising delivers enquiries that evaporate on the first phone call. In five weeks of Meta campaigns for Just Foster, a national fostering agency, we filled close to the year's carer quota. This is the working.
The ledger, with its denominators
Flight one, 28 February to 2 April 2026, Meta only. 322 enquiries, of which 190 passed Just Foster's own screening for age, residency and a spare room: a 59% qualification rate. Media cost per qualified enquiry came in under £10, and under £6 per raw enquiry.
Flight three, 27 August to 10 September 2026. 258 enquiries, 210 qualified on the same screen (81%), at £4.51 media per qualified enquiry and £3.67 per raw enquiry: 37% cheaper than flight one like for like on the agency's own tracker measure, and less than half on media per qualified enquiry.
Across both flights. Around 600 enquiries and around 400 qualified. Four foster carers approved so far, all from flight one, whose enquiries are still being worked through assessment. On media cost that is roughly £710 per approved carer to date, with flight three's approvals still to come; on the agency's conversion so far, two to four more is a reasonable expectation from flight three, and we label that a forecast, not a result.
Definitions and limits. An enquiry is a completed Meta lead form. Qualified means the agency's screening questions were passed before first contact; it is not an approved carer. Approval takes months and we do not claim it. The "close to a year's quota" figure is the agency's own reading of flight one against its annual recruitment target, given to us by its CEO, and we publish it on that basis. Figures are media cost only, from Meta Ads Manager and the client's tracker, and exclude our fee; flight three uses the account total including four set-up days before launch, so its cost per enquiry is stated at the high side. Other recruitment activity ran alongside, so the campaign is one contributor, not the sole cause.
Why fostering advertising usually fails
The economics are unusual. A fostering agency doesn't need volume. It needs a small number of people who will pass a long, serious assessment: home checks, references, panel. An ad that generates five hundred curious clicks and no approvable carers has not underperformed; it has failed completely. Yet most agency reporting stops at "leads generated," which in fostering is a vanity number.
The second problem is speed and care in follow-up. Enquiring about fostering is a significant emotional step. An enquiry that waits days for a reply, or gets a scripted call-centre response, goes cold, and that person rarely enquires twice.
What we actually built
1 · Creative that qualifies before the click. The ads did the first stage of screening themselves. Honest creative about what fostering asks of people (a spare room, time, resilience) costs you clicks and saves you everything downstream. Our worst-performing ad by click-through was among the best by approved-carer contribution.
2 · A 14-stage qualification pipeline, agreed before launch. Every enquiry was tracked from click through fourteen named stages, first contact, screening questions, home-check eligibility, references, panel, in Just Foster's CRM. Not our labels: theirs, agreed in writing before a pound was spent. That single document is why nobody argued about what "a lead" meant afterwards.
3 · Plain-English monthly reporting. One report a month a busy director can read in five minutes: what was spent, what each stage holds, what was learned, what changes next. The CEO's words, not ours: "I show these numbers to people myself."
What moved the number
Three things, in order of impact. Qualification at the creative level: the audience that clicks an honest ad is smaller and dramatically better. Stage-level tracking: because we could see exactly where people stalled, budget moved weekly toward the audiences producing stage-9-plus carers, not stage-1 clicks. Follow-up discipline: enquiries reached a human quickly, and the pipeline made it visible when they didn't.
None of this is secret. It's the unglamorous work most advertising skips because clicks are easier to report than approved carers.
If you run a fostering agency
The checklist we'd hand any fostering or care-sector agency, free of charge:
① Define the real number: approved carers (or placements), not enquiries. Agree it with your marketing provider in writing.
② Map your qualification stages before the campaign, and insist every enquiry is tracked through them in your CRM, not in the agency's spreadsheet.
③ Let ads be honest about the ask. Cheap clicks are expensive in fostering.
④ Measure speed-to-first-human-contact weekly. It moves approvals more than any creative decision.
⑤ Read one report a month that a non-marketer can understand. If you can't, the reporting is the problem.
Fostering or care-sector agency with a quota to fill? We'll show you this ledger in full on a call: the stages, the reporting, what it costs.
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