Human rights work lives or dies by public attention – and public attention is volatile.
When a crisis in Gaza dominates the news cycle, campaigns around protest laws or social security can fade into the background.
Amnesty International UK faced exactly this challenge: a lead generation programme that was working, but whose performance swung with the news in ways that made planning difficult and long-term supporter relationships hard to build.
We worked with their team to bring more structure, better data, and a framework that could keep pace with one of the most unpredictable news environments in recent memory.
About Amnesty International UK
Amnesty International UK investigates and campaigns against human rights abuses at home and abroad, working across issues from migrant rights and protest laws to everyday rights and global conflicts. Their fundraising relies on converting engaged members of the public into regular givers – a process that starts with digital lead generation and continues through phone contact.
We’ve worked with Amnesty since 2024 to grow that pipeline through paid digital campaigns.
An unpredictable news cycle created unstable supporter recruitment
Amnesty’s campaigns are inherently tied to public interest in human rights issues, and that interest moves fast. Attention shifts from domestic protest legislation to international conflicts to corporate scandals – often within weeks. The risk wasn’t that any individual campaign would fail, but that lead generation would become over-reliant on whichever issue happened to dominate the news, leaving performance exposed when attention moved on.
This made it genuinely difficult to plan across the fundraising year. Cost-per-lead targets varied sharply between campaigns, and the team had limited visibility into which lead types were converting best through to donation – making it hard to know where to concentrate budget or when to push harder on a particular issue.
Building a flexible framework with better tracking and smarter planning
Rather than optimising campaign by campaign, we built a structured approach designed to maintain steady performance across the whole year. The foundation was better tracking and reporting infrastructure, giving the Amnesty team real-time visibility of campaign performance across different lead types and cost targets – not just clicks and registrations, but downstream conversion data that connected digital activity to actual donor value.
We improved audience targeting to make sharper use of budget, and worked closely with the team to map upcoming news moments and plan campaigns around them in advance rather than reacting after the fact.
Fortnightly planning and review meetings kept activity aligned with targets and created space to shift resource quickly when an issue gained traction. This rhythm of planning, testing and optimisation meant the programme could stay responsive to a fast-moving news environment without sacrificing consistency.
125,000 leads and annual targets hit by July
The results across six months were excellent.
- The campaigns generated over 125,000 leads in total and recruited nearly 3,000 regular givers.
- Amnesty exceeded their annual cash donor target by July – achieving their full-year goal with five months still to run.
- They exceeded monthly regular giving targets by around 50% in June and July.
- The Pride Bracelet campaign alone generated over 4,500 donations
Amnesty now has a lead generation programme that reaches different segments of the British public at different levels of engagement, rather than depending on a single issue to carry performance.
The downstream conversion data also gave the team clearer guidance on where higher lead costs are justified by stronger phone conversion – making future budget decisions easier to defend.
“The Platypus team have helped us bring structure and clarity to how we operate,” said Autumn Chard, Paid Marketing Manager at Amnesty International UK.
“They challenged us to rethink how we approach KPI reporting and better connect our data across teams. This has enabled us to make more informed, strategic decisions. We’re grateful for the Platypus team’s friendly, collaborative approach and the positive change to our digital fundraising programme they have helped to drive.”
