Friends of the Holy Land: From £500k to £1 million turnover in 3.5 years

Friends of the Holy Land (FHL) is a charity supporting the ancient and vulnerable Christian community in Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan and the surrounding region. 

When the pandemic hit in 2020, their beneficiaries faced a crisis and the charity needed to raise much more support. They came to Better Story for help with fundraising and supporter communications. 

Getting more strategic

We worked closely with FHL’s CEO and UK office team over the following the last three and a half years to run an integrated communications service. Each year, we collaborated with the charity on a 12-month communications plan to take supporters on a journey through the charity’s activities, give them opportunities to get involved, and prepare them for fundraising asks.

Professional design and copy 

Our work has included monthly email news, blog posts, social media posts, press releases, printed newsletters, booklets and two direct mail campaigns each year to engage and motivate supporters. 

The result is a better-known charity with powerful messaging and clear calls to action, making it easy for supporters to share information and donate.

Lists that love you back

We also improved the sign-up process for FHL’s email lists and increased their email open rates. We did this through a strategic and thorough clean-up, removing inactive subscribers and re-engaging hundreds of others. 

Christmas 2023 Campaign: £200,000 raised

Our strategy for Christmas 2023 was to highlight the region’s growing tension and the increased pressure this was putting on Christian families. More and more Christians were deciding to leave their homeland and emigrate abroad in search of an easier life and future.

The campaign message: “Don’t let their light go out,” would ask supporters to give to projects that would improve the Christian community’s prospects and stop the last Christians from leaving this historic area forever.

We finished the first draft of the mailing on Friday 6 October – then the violence of 7 October happened and the region erupted into war.

Our team worked quickly to adapt the campaign to the crisis. Our original campaign message was still relevant, but we adjusted the asks to reflect the new need for a huge amount of emergency aid. 

We got the campaign page up ahead of schedule and moved the email campaign forwards. Donations started flooding in. By Christmas, the campaign had raised £200,000 – the most the charity had ever raised from one appeal. 

Hope & Healing from Lent to Easter: £190,000 raised (and counting!)

Sadly, at the start of 2024, the situation had only worsened in the Holy Land and the need for emergency aid continued. 

We worked with FHL on an Easter campaign, this time focused on planting seeds for a brighter future as well as tending to the emergency. Aware of potential ‘donor fatigue’, we put a strategy in place which offered a new message around building a fund for this community’s long-term recovery. The campaign highlighted how the Christmas donations had already made a difference, as well as detailing future projects that would benefit from the fund. 

This launched at the beginning of Lent with a direct mail pack. The campaign continued via email during Lent, and we sent a second mailing with a booklet for Holy Week. By the end of Easter Sunday, the campaign had raised £150,000 and was still receiving donations in May 2024, bringing its total to £190,000. Altogether we had raised nearly £400,000 to help those affected by the war in the Middle East.

For both campaigns, Better Story produced:

• Campaign strategy and timeline. 

• Two direct mail packs including letters and response mechanisms, along with extra items to engage supporters like a poster and prayer guide booklets. 

• An accompanying email campaign.

• Social media posts.

• A landing page for action and donations, including relevant video content.

A better known and more resilient charity

FHL’s collaboration with Better Story has resulted in raising much more income from supporters than the charity had ever done before, exceeding their targets. With double the turnover, they are now able to change the lives of many more very vulnerable families living in the Holy Land.

“Better Story have done a great job. They’ve raised our profile, helping to bring in new supporters and encouraging existing supporters to give more. They were a pleasure to work with and we would highly recommend their work.” 

– Brendan, Executive Director, Friends of the Holy Land.