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Last week, after the edition on photos that prove nothing, I asked when you last reviewed your organisation's photo library. The split is telling:

What this tells us: Two camps, no middle ground. Half of you have audited your library recently and are treating it as an active asset. The other half, honestly, do not have an organised library at all. Nobody voted for "the last month," "the last year," or "more than a year ago."

That pattern is about infrastructure. Charities tend to be either deliberately ready or entirely unready, with very little in between. Which is exactly the question this week's edition is built around. When a big media moment lands, which side of that line is your organisation actually on?

Over the last few weeks I have been speaking to a number of UK charity leaders, and the same phrase keeps surfacing in almost every conversation.

"We were in the Guardian. A minister visited. The campaign went global. And then, nothing."

Three likes on the social post that followed the coverage. A flat donations page. A silent inbox. The board asking why the visibility is not translating. The team asking themselves the same question with quieter voices.

The default diagnosis in the sector is that the moment was fumbled. That the team was not fast enough, the post-coverage email was not sharp enough, the countdown was not tight enough. The advice that follows is always the same. Tighter conversion windows. Harder calls to action. A matched giving appeal inside 48 hours.

This is the wrong diagnosis, and it produces the wrong advice.

The real problem is that the sector is still measuring press coverage with the wrong stopwatch. You are not meant to be holding a 48-hour stopwatch. You are meant to be holding a five-year one.

In 2014, a few days after the public inquest into my late fiancé Naz’s death, I did my first live television interview on Sky News. I had no training. No plan beyond telling the truth about a beautiful man and the cultural homophobia that took his life. No website worth the name. What we had was a single holding page that said, "If you need help or support, email this address." That was it.

The interview went out. Then came the surge. Media requests from BBC, ITV, LBC, The Guardian, The Independent. And alongside them, hundreds of messages from strangers. People who had never heard of anyone in a situation like theirs before. People saying, I have been carrying this for twenty years and nobody has ever said it out loud.

I was not ready to receive them. There was no CRM. No drip. No triage. No plan for what to do when forty people write in and you have capacity for five.

What I built afterwards was not a campaign. It was quiet infrastructure. A website that answered the actual questions people kept asking. How old was Naz? Where did this happen? How do we find support? A way to capture email addresses, not because of a funnel, but because I knew that some people would need a reply in six months and others in six years, and I had no way of knowing which. A habit of reading inbox messages for patterns, and trusting those patterns more than I trusted marketing advice.

None of it was fancy. Website. Inbox. Skype account.

Within a year of Naz's passing, someone I had never met messaged me persistently. At the time I assumed it was curiosity. I eventually agreed to a Skype call.

We both put our video on. They sat in silence for a long moment. Then they asked me the one question the infrastructure had been built to receive. How did Naz successfully live away from his family for so many years, in peace and quiet? What did he tell his parents about not marrying? What reasons did he give for moving to London? They needed those answers to survive a situation of their own.

There was no support service then. No referral pathway. Just a stranger on a Skype call, holding a question that had travelled to me through a news interview, a barely-functioning website, and a persistent email.

That conversation is what infrastructure is for.

Six years later, in 2020, the Naz and Matt Foundation ran its largest campaign. World Suicide Prevention Day. We worked with a PR agency to reach radio and television programmes specifically inside religious communities. The reach, when the numbers came in, was approximately 54 million people. I did twenty-seven interviews over two days. I questioned the figure multiple times before accepting it.

The quietest week in our year was the week after.

That was not a failure. It was the point.

The campaign was never about donations. It was never about direct enquiries the week after. It was about planting a seed of an idea inside religious communities that LGBTQ+ people are dying because of how their families are reacting to them. Seeds do not sprout in 48 hours. Seeds sprout when one person carries the story to another person, who carries it to another, who eventually carries it to the person who needed it. In our work, that journey can take one year, two years, five years.

Your 48-hour stopwatch is measuring the wrong thing.

And the cost of running a campaign like that, honestly, was enormous. After the twenty-seven interviews, I was drained mentally, physically, emotionally, and psychologically. I have not wanted to run a campaign of that scale since. If you are considering this kind of visibility, build rest and recovery into the plan from day one. It is not optional.

The question your team should be asking after a big media moment is not, "How do we convert this in 48 hours?"

It is,

That reframe changes everything. It changes your website before the coverage. It changes what you do with the email that arrives three months later. It changes what your impact report for this year includes and what it saves for the year after. It changes whether your team feels the "so what?" as a failure or as the beginning of a five-year conversation.

Naz and Matt Foundation's support group for South Asian parents of LGBTQI+ children, Rainbow Chai, did not arrive from a 48-hour conversion funnel. It arrived from inbox patterns noticed over years. From the question that kept repeating until we understood it was not a question but a programme waiting to be built.

Coverage is raw material. What you do with it over the next five years is the actual work.

A five-stage approach to building infrastructure that catches the people your next media moment reaches, whenever they arrive.

1. Answer. Before the coverage lands, write the website that answers the questions your audience will actually ask. Not "about us." The real questions. How did this happen? Who does this affect? Where do we go for help? What does it mean for my family? The questions your team already hears at events and in inboxes. Publish those answers clearly, so a stranger arriving at midnight can find them without needing you to reply first.

2. Receive. Build the simplest possible way for a stranger to raise their hand. An email address that works (and is checked by the most appropriate person). A short form that does not demand a reason or force them to reveal their real name. A human-readable invitation that says, you can tell me you exist, and that is enough.

3. Hold. Decide now what happens to incoming messages during the worst week of your year. And, just as importantly, decide what your triage plan is when demand exceeds capacity. Small charities cannot always reply to every message. That is real. What is not acceptable is having no plan. Agree the process in advance. What you can answer, what you cannot, what receives a holding reply, what gets signposted elsewhere. An unanswered email is a broken promise. A holding reply, honestly written, is not.

4. Pattern. Assign someone in your organisation to read incoming messages for repetition. The question that keeps appearing is not a question. It is your next programme or strategy. Rainbow Chai came from pattern recognition over years of inbox messages. Your next service line is probably already sitting unread in your support inbox.

5. Return. Plan deliberately to reuse the coverage. One interview is not one moment. It is raw material. With permission and a small amount of effort, the same interview becomes a podcast clip, a video, a quote on your website, a national news story, a local news story, a radio segment, a TV package, the opening of a talk, the centrepiece of a seminar, a workshop case study, a page in a training manual, a module in an online course, a set of training notes for new staff. The same story can still be working for you in year five.

One practical note inside Return…

Before any interview with the BBC, ITV, or a national news channel, ask up front if you can have a copy of the recording. If they say no, ask a friend, relative or colleague to record the broadcast. For radio, use radio recording software. Capture every media moment for your own archive. The broadcaster owns their use. You own your history. Nobody will do this for you.

Run this test twice for every significant media moment. Once before. Once after.

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Two Spotify playlists I listen to regularly (I'm listening to #1 as I type this) - full of binaural beats and vocal-free tracks chosen to help you get into deep focus and stay there.

Most charity teams lose their best stories before they ever get told. A conversation with a beneficiary. A moment from a site visit. A quote that came up in a trustee meeting. None of it captured, none of it usable.

I've created this free Notion template to give you a simple system for capturing impact stories the moment they happen and tracking them through to publication.

Download the free Notion template

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Until next week, sending you safe and peaceful energy

Matt Mahmood-Ogston
Award-winning impact storyteller, photographer and charity CEO.
Portfolio: ogston.com