Give Russians real news about Ukraine using ads

On Saturday 25th February we started our campaign to bring independent news to Russia. I'm writing you a note to update you on what we've done in the last six months, and what we are planning to do next.

The campaign so far

So far we've shown over 400,000,000 ads in Russia, driving almost half a million clicks that help Russians to access independent news.

As I always say, we can't really reveal much about how we do this, because we want to make it harder for Putin's censors to block us.

But I can give you a flavour of the sort of work we do every day.

• Dealing with an overzealous bank freezing our accounts because they had the word 'Russia' prominently on large cash transfers.
• Working out what to do about being banned or suspended from advertising for 'political' ads.
• Quite a lot of conversations with lawyers and financial experts about the innards of the international financial system and sanctions regimes.
• Hundreds of emails and phone calls with a team who are anywhere from Georgia to the Baltic states or California on any given day.
• Lots of wrangling of digital analytics to find out whether the campaign is working.

In fact we've ended up writing a little manual on how to beat censorship, so that we can train new team members to work on our campaign for the long term.

What we are doing next

We now have a plan for the next year.

Firstly we are planning to expand our campaign. Thanks to generous donors we'll be able to reach more people than we have so far, and we are going to be able to test more techniques. 

Secondly we're planning to become a permanent campaign, sharing these techniques with people fighting censorship in authoritarian countries around the world. We're early in the process, so I'll share more with you later this year.

And finally...

Thank you for your generous support so far, and all the lovely messages I am sent by campaign supporters. We read all of them - and it's always nice to get them.

All the best,

Rob Blackie.