Facebook ads for a charity

A UK charity working in Yemen, Palestine and Greece employed five people to run its marketing. All five flopped. Donations now arrive from countries they had never reached.

QB, Charity. Recorded March 2025.

QB runs a UK charity with a 100 percent donation policy. Their work started in Greece, opening the first Muslim graveyard for refugees, and has since extended to Yemen, Palestine and elsewhere.

They make their own video — he describes himself as a video guy, and that is genuinely his craft. The problem was never the content. It was distribution: films that deserved to be seen were not reaching anyone.

Their second year was bad enough that they hired five people in succession to fix it. All five failed. For a charity that is not an inconvenience, it is money out of a donation pool that was meant to fund field work.

Since the campaigns were rebuilt, their videos have travelled. Donations now come from countries they had never received from before, and the awareness raised — particularly around Yemen — has become part of the work itself rather than just funding it.

Charity advertising has a different objective from commercial advertising and the same mechanics. The ask is a donation rather than a purchase, but the job is identical: get the right film in front of the right person often enough for them to act.

A charity making good video and getting no reach is one of the more fixable situations in advertising. The hard part is already done.

In QB’s words