Give Russians real news about Ukraine using ads

It's been 102 days since we launched our campaign - and we are still getting independent news into Russia.

This is going to be quite a long update, but if you read nothing else:

1. We're now ready to run our campaign for another 6 months - and to expand it further.

2. So far we've now shown over 283,000,000 ads.

What's been going on - in depth

We couldn't have run our campaign so far without help from supporters like you. Thank you again.

This is what we've been doing in the last month to scale up our campaign. 

Partnerships

We've been working with over 15 organisations who are involved in promoting democracy in some way, mainly run by Russians and Ukrainians. This has underpinned everything else that we do.

Insights - understanding how to be effective in Russia

We've been working with freedom fighting Ukrainians and Russians who have related campaigns to ours, for instance reporting on what is happening in Russia. We've started to link these partners to our team of advertising planners, political strategists and behavioural scientists. This will continue to make sure that we are as effective as possible at changing people's minds about the war in Ukraine.

Linked to this we've been carefully measuring whether our campaigns actually grab people's attention. Inevitably some don't work. But overall we are pleased to see that most of our ads get much more attention than industry norms. Generally our ads get viewed for longer, get clicked more and have more impact compared to a typical ad.

Ads delivery

We can't give away how we get news into Russia. But we can say that we have been working closely with other groups who are expert at beating censorship. Again we've linked them to our team of advertising technologists.

We're both learning new techniques from our allies, and sharing a few of our own. We don't just try to get news to people once, we also work to make sure that people learn where to go to get news every day about what is going on.

Ethics

We've put in place some careful checks to protect our volunteers, partners and people who see our ads. Again we can't say much about this, but their safety continues to be important.

We have also established checks to ensure that we always link to content from reputable and appropriate sources.

Building for the long term

We don't know how long the war in Ukraine will go on for, or how long Putin will stay in power. So we've started to plan for the long term - so that we have a sustainable team, funding and organisational base. Right now we have around 60 volunteers as well as many more people in our partner organisations.

We're now ready for the next 6 months  - and we are continuing to seek funding so that we can get even more news into Russia.

Thanks again for your support,

Rob.