$279,300 raised for Udhiya. 94,000 people fed. A $50,000 grant won with a video made in 48 hours.
A volunteer-run American charity for Sudan needed a marketing department during the worst year in the country's modern history. This is cause work, presented as cause work.
Period: February to August 2024, end-of-service report. Every figure is taken from the client report and labelled with its source. No figure has been rounded upward.
The client
Sadagaat USA is a California 501(c)(3), part of the Sadagaat network founded in Khartoum in 2001, funding food, health, water and education projects in Sudan. Its people are volunteers. Cush was its marketing department: content, campaign creative, email, website and the answers donors get when they write in.
Where they started
Need in Sudan rising every month after April 2023, a volunteer team already at capacity, and a website carrying more than 2,000 technical errors that dragged on its search visibility.
What was wrong
The organisation did not have a giving problem. It had a capacity problem: every campaign needed creative, copy, email, landing pages and donor replies at the same time, and no one person could produce all of it fast enough.
What we did
Campaign creative and copy for Udhiya, two central-kitchens appeals, the water campaign on LaunchGood and the DMV Cup, plus content on the partnership work with the World Food Programme.
Six donor emails, each opened between roughly 1,700 and 2,076 times.
More than 2,000 website errors removed, 13 SEO articles written, and on-page work on the home, project, FAQ and donate pages.
A donor FAQ so volunteers answer comments and messages consistently.
For sister organisation Sadagaat Canada: a pitch video, script, voiceover and PDF produced inside 48 hours for a corporate grant competition.
What changed
The Udhiya campaign raised $279,300 and fed more than 94,000 people. The two central-kitchens appeals raised $14,000 and $15,000. The 48-hour video helped Sadagaat Canada secure a $50,000 grant from Prophix, funding 50,000 meals. Reach rose 149.81 per cent to 88,286 and followers to 5,837 in the second period. The website went from 2,000 errors to none.
The evidence
Every number on this page carries one of three labels, and the period it covers is stated above the figures.
Capacity is the constraint, not the cause.
The sector was humanitarian. The move was an outsourced department that could produce creative, copy, email and web fixes in the same week. Most small organisations are constrained by hands, not ideas.
Read the next case, or find out which pattern your marketing fits.
MyMTN: 12,161 app downloads at 25 cents each. A $3,000 trial that wrote the scaling plan.