Hello {{first_name}}. When something you've made falls flat, the meeting that follows is always about the thing you made. It's almost never about who was there to see it.

This week, for the 3,520 of us here, it's about the room, and how you build one before you publish into it.

A director at a UK charity I've been working with told me about their impact film. Professionally made, about a significant moment at one of their services. She was proud of it. She was right to be. It was good. She shared it with her own network, and here is what happened:

Edition 15 was about what happens when the right people arrive and you've built nothing to catch them. This is the other half of that problem, and it's both more common and more demoralising: they never arrived at all.

Sit on the word disappointed for a second, because that's where the damage is.

She didn't lose money on it. What she lost was a bit of confidence in her own judgement about what's worth making. And that's the expensive part, because the next time somebody in that organisation suggests filming something, there'll be a half-second pause that wasn't there before.

I've watched this happen to good teams repeatedly. The film underperforms, so the conclusion is that the storytelling is weak. Then the team makes less, and what they do make is more cautious, and the cautious version performs worse than the brave one did. That's the actual harm here. Not a quiet week on LinkedIn. A team that quietly stops trying.

When something lands flat, the post-mortem interrogates the content. It was too long. The hook was weak. We should have used subtitles. We should have cut it to sixty seconds.

Sometimes that's right. Far more often the content was completely fine and there was simply nobody there to see it.

The mechanism is dull and it's worth saying out loud. A piece of content can only reach the people who are already connected to whoever published it, plus whatever the platform decides to hand onward. If the people who needed to see that film were corporate funders, and no corporate funder was connected to anybody at that organisation, then no version of that film was ever going to reach one. Not a better cut. Not a better hook. The room was empty before the lights went up.

You can't fix that after you publish. You can only fix it before.

I've been on the other side of this, and it's the reason I'm confident about it.

In 2019 I directed a documentary called My God I'm Queer. It went out on Channel 4 and it did what we made it to do. People found it. It got talked about in places we hadn't reached before. It went on to win Best TV Programme at the Asian Media Awards.

If I released exactly the same film this year, I don't think it would land the way it did.

Nothing about the film would be different. Same footage, same people, same argument, same 30 minutes of your life. What's changed is everything standing around it. The political weather is harder now. The public conversation about queer lives has narrowed and in places turned openly hostile. In 2019 there was a room ready for that film. It would be a different room now, and it would hear it differently.

I'm not telling you to wait for the perfect moment, because you'll wait forever, and some things have to be said into a hostile room precisely because it's hostile. What I'm telling you is that the room is a real thing with real conditions, and when something doesn't land, the room is at least as likely to be the reason as the work is.

Here's the useful part of that. The wider weather you mostly can't control. Who is standing in the room on the day you publish, you almost entirely can.

There's a version of this argument that goes badly wrong, and I want to name it plainly rather than tuck it in at the end.

Building the room is not the same as re-cutting the story to suit the room.

You change who you invite. You do not change what the story is, and you do not change what the person in it agreed to. Somebody who consented to appear in a film about a service did not consent to being repositioned as bait for a corporate funder. If the only way you can make a film work is to make the person in it more palatable to the people you're trying to impress, you don't have a distribution problem any more. You have a different problem, and no amount of audience-building will fix it.

The whole point of doing this properly is that the film doesn't have to change. That's what makes it worth doing.

Because it's boring, and because it produces nothing you can put in a report.

Nobody has ever opened a board meeting by announcing that they sent forty LinkedIn connection requests last week. There's no output. There's no artefact. There's no moment where it's finished. It's about investing at least twenty minutes a week, indefinitely, and the entire payoff is invisible until the day you publish something that matters and it lands in front of the right people.

Here's my own version.

I've been on LinkedIn for twenty-two years. I've got a bit over 15,000 followers. Most of them arrived in the last two and a half years.

Two decades on the platform built almost none of it. What built it was showing up for a minimum of twenty minutes, most week days, for about thirty months. No campaign, no budget, no launch. It's the least interesting thing I do and it's the reason anything I publish gets seen at all.

One thing I'm not going to resolve here: whether it's fair to ask staff to do this on their personal LinkedIn accounts. It's a real question, it came up in the same conversation, and it's a whole edition of its own. I'll come back to it.

For now, the smaller point. The film was fine. Go and build the room.

Four stages. All of them happen before you publish on LinkedIn, and ideally weeks before you make the thing.

1. Name the room. Who specifically needs to see this. Not "our supporters", not "the sector", not "funders". A named category of person with a job title and a reason to care. Heads of ESG at mid-sized employers within an hour's drive. Trusts and foundations officers who fund early years work in the north west. If you can't get it that specific, stop. What you've got isn't an audience problem, it's a purpose problem, and you'd be making the film to no end.

2. Count the room. Now go and count how many of those people are currently connected to an actual named human being at your organisation. Not following the charity page, connected to a person. Search the job title, filter to your area, and look at how many come back as first-degree.

This is the uncomfortable stage, and the uncomfortable number is the entire point of it. Most organisations doing this for the first time find the answer is somewhere between nought and five. Write the number down. It's the most useful thing you'll learn all week.

3. Fill the room. This is the one everybody skips, so here's the smallest possible version.

Individual LinkedIn accounts, not the organisation page. A company page is something people follow once they're already interested, and the people you need aren't interested yet. They'll accept a connection from a person long before they'll follow a charity.

Search the job title from stage 1, filter to second-degree connections and to your patch, and send connection requests. No note. Fifteen or twenty a week from two or three people is plenty, and it beats a hundred in one burst and then nothing, because the weekly allowance resets rather than accruing. A week you skip is gone permanently.

If you want a starting commitment small enough that you'll actually do it: one person, twenty minutes, Friday morning, once a week.

4. Then publish. The film goes out into a room that exists.

Same film. Same length. Same edit. Same person in it, telling it the way they agreed to tell it. Nothing about the work changes. The only thing that changed is who was in the room when it played.

One row per item. Set it up as a shared sheet, not a document, because the whole point is that it gets sorted by the first column.

The part everybody stalls on is working out who to search for and what to type. That's all this does. It doesn't write anything and it doesn't touch the content itself.

Don't run the whole audit. Do stage two, on its own, this week.

Pick the last thing you published that you were proud of. Name the one person who needed to see it. Then go and count how many people like that are connected to somebody here.

Whatever that number is, it explains more about what happened to that piece of work than any conversation you had about the edit.

And if it's nought, that's not a verdict on the work. It's a diary entry for Friday morning.

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Until next week, please take care.

Warm wishes,

Matt Mahmood-Ogston
Award-winning impact storyteller, photographer and charity CEO.
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