Hello {{first_name}}. Just over a week ago I published something on LinkedIn I believed in, braced for disagreement, and then watched my own comment section turn into a place I would not want a single person I am trying to protect to have to read.
I got things wrong that day. This edition, written for the 3,309 of us here, is what those mistakes taught me about speaking up on hard things without leaving your people exposed.
In this edition
WEEKLY POLL
Is there a cause your organisation privately supports but has held back from saying so publicly, because you fear the backlash?
Poll results will be shared in next week's edition.
LAST WEEK’S POLL RESULTS
"Which best describes the change you're trying to drive through your work?"
Poll respondents split almost evenly between two goals: direct support for people who need it, and a public, cultural shift. A few of you are mobilising collective action.
Today’s edition is really for the cultural-shift group, because public attitudes never change while organisations stay quiet. They change when an organisation lets itself be seen taking a position. And that is the part most of us find hardest.
THIS WEEK’S BIG IDEA
We agree with it. We just can't be seen to say it publicly.
Your silence will not protect you.
Audre Lorde wrote that for people who believed that keeping their heads down would keep them safe. It rarely does. Silence does not take you out of the situation. It just decides who pays for it. Usually someone with far less protection than you.
There is a sentence I hear from charity leaders more than almost any other, and it is always said quietly.
"We agree with it. We just can't be seen to say it publicly."
The "it" changes. Sometimes it is trans rights. Sometimes it is the treatment of people seeking asylum. Sometimes it is immigration, or race, or a local planning fight that has turned ugly. The pattern underneath is always the same. The organisation holds a clear private view that flows directly from its mission, and chooses public silence because the alternative feels too dangerous.
I understand the fear completely. I am not going to pretend the danger is imaginary. But I want to make the case this week that silence is not the safe option you think it is. It only moves the cost somewhere you cannot see it.
The cost you are not counting
When your charity stays quiet on something it believes, you are not avoiding a cost. You are choosing who pays it.
The first to pay are the people you exist to serve. If you run an LGBTQI+ charity and you say nothing while a community is told it must prove it belongs in public life, your silence is information. It tells the people watching that even their allies went quiet when it mattered. The same is true for a refugee charity that will not name what is happening to people seeking asylum, or a disability charity that will not challenge a policy it knows will cause harm.
The second to pay are your own people. The sector is not imagining this pressure. A December 2025 NCVO report described a "pervasive climate of fear" across charities, with organisations reporting "forced invisibility", direct targeting of staff, and a chilling effect on what they feel able to say at all.
Some had cancelled community events. Some had reduced their online presence. Some had removed trustees' names from their own websites after threats.
More than thirty sector organisations have now joined a campaign specifically to push back against this chilling effect. When an organisation goes quiet out of fear, the silence does not protect the team. It teaches them that the work is not safe to do in public, and the most visible people are the first to withdraw.
There is a real cost to speaking. There is also a real cost to silence. The leadership task is not to pretend one of those costs does not exist. It is to count both honestly, and then decide.
Visible allyship is a position, not a personality
Here is a reframe that helps the leaders I work with.
Being a visible ally is not about being brave, or loud, or comfortable with conflict. Plenty of the most effective allies I know are none of those things. It is a strategic and ethical position your organisation takes on purpose, for reasons connected to your mission, with a plan attached. It is closer to a safeguarding decision than a marketing one.
That reframe matters, because "should we be braver online" is an unanswerable question that mostly produces guilt. "Does our mission require us to take a public position on this, and if it does, how do we do it without leaving our people exposed" is a question a senior team can actually answer on a Tuesday.
I had my own version of this recently, and I made real mistakes worth passing on. I published a post taking a clear position as a cisgender gay man on a contested piece of policy. It reached several thousand people and moved a number of them to take the concrete action I had asked for.
It also brought a wave of hostility into the comments, most of it from a small group of accounts determined to turn the thread into a debate about whether a whole group of people deserve rights at all.
Here is what I got wrong.
I posted it on LinkedIn, which I had always assumed was the safest, most professional of the platforms. It is not immune, and assuming it was made me careless.
I left the comments fully open, when I could have selected "allow only my connections to comment" and simply did not (tbh, I never knew that was a feature, because I'd never had to use it before).
And I published it on a morning when I was actually going to be out for most of the day at the House of Lords supporting women's rights, which meant that for the crucial first hours, when a thread is most shapeable, I was not there to moderate it at all.
The result is the lesson I most want to pass on.
An open comment thread on a contested post does not only expose you. It can quietly become a platform that amplifies hate, and that hate is visible to the very people you were trying to support and protect.
A frightened trans reader scrolling your supportive post does not just see your words. They see fifty replies underneath arguing they do not deserve rights. You did not write those words, but you built the room they are standing in. That realisation has changed how I think about every stand I take.
The framework below is built partly from getting it wrong that day, and partly from nearly twelve years of getting these decisions right and wrong at our charity, Naz and Matt Foundation.
The single most useful thing I can tell you is this. The goal is not to win the comments. The goal is to make your stand, reach the people who needed to see it, and protect your team while you do.
Those are three different jobs, and the trolls only matter to one of them.
I want to name someone here. On the day my post went up, Sam Hope, a counsellor and trainer, spent hours in my comments, doing the patient, draining work of holding the line with people who were arguing in bad faith, and afterwards was generous enough to offer to talk it through with me.
If you want a deeper, sharper guide to when and how to engage with this kind of hostility, and when not to, Sam has written one, and it is well worth your time: Cis allies versus transphobes: when and how to engage.
Free speech does not mean you host the abuse
The objection that stops most charities is some version of "but free speech". So let me be precise, because this is where a lot of good people tie themselves in knots.
Free speech is a principle about the state not punishing you for your views. It has never meant that you, personally, are obliged to provide a platform, a microphone and an attentive audience to anyone who wants to abuse the people you serve.
The UN's human rights office made this point plainly in 2025: moderating content to prevent real harm is not censorship, and treating it as such ignores that an unmoderated space silences the marginalised most of all.
Your comment section is not a public square. It is a room in your house. Deciding who gets to keep shouting in that room is not censorship. It is hosting.
Which leads to the four permissions I most want charity and social impact leaders to take from this edition, because almost everyone I speak to is waiting for someone to grant them:
It is okay to decide who can comment, before you ever post. You are not obliged to leave your comment section open to the entire internet. Restricting a contested post to your connections, or switching comments off while still letting people react and share, is not hiding from debate. It is refusing to host a pile-on in a room you are responsible for. This is the permission I most needed and did not take.
It is okay to delete a comment once you have taken a screenshot. The screenshot preserves the evidence for reporting and for your records. The deletion stops the hate from doing its work in the feeds of the people you are trying to protect.
It is okay to block someone. Blocking is not losing the argument. It is removing a bad-faith actor from a space you are responsible for, and often the most protective thing you can do for the next person who would have read it.
You do not owe your time, your attention, or a thoughtful reply to anyone throwing hate at your charity, your team, or your work. Engagement is a gift. You are allowed to withhold it from people acting in bad faith, and withholding it is frequently the strategically smarter move, because every reply lifts the hostile comment into more feeds.
And silence, when your mission calls for a voice, is itself a decision your stakeholders will read. You are allowed to weigh its cost alongside the cost of speaking, rather than treating quiet as automatically safe.
None of this requires you to be reckless. It requires you to decide on purpose, frame it well, hold the line, and protect your people. That is the protocol.
Framework: The Visible Ally Protocol
Four stages. Decide, frame, hold, protect. Run them in order, every time you take a public position on contested ground.
Stage one. Decide on purpose.
Before anything is written, answer one question as a senior team, not as a comms afterthought.
Does our mission require us to take a public position on this? If the honest answer is no, you are under no obligation, and "not this one" is a legitimate, defensible choice. If the answer is yes, write down the single action you want a reader to take as a result. A visible stand without an ask is just exposure. A visible stand with one clear ask is a campaign. Decide who internally has signed this off, so that nobody carries it alone later.
Stage two. Frame so the door is closed.
Hostile reframing exploits the door you leave open (this is the heart of Edition 18, and the AI prompt there still applies).
For a proactive stand, three checks before you publish.
Have you named the structural cause, not just the harm?
Have you centred the agency of the people affected, rather than their victimhood?
Have you chosen a messenger whose visibility does not put them at additional risk, and if the messenger is at risk, have you added the protections they need?
Lead with your own identity and lived authority where you have it. It is harder to dismiss a stand when the person making it has standing.
Stage three. Hold the line, do not host the debate.
Decide who can comment before you post, not in the heat of the reaction.
This is the single setting I most wish I had used: on LinkedIn, "allow only my connections to comment", and the equivalent on other platforms, keeps a contested thread inside people who can be held to some account. Switching comments off entirely, while still allowing reactions and shares, is always available to you too.
And do not publish a contentious piece on a day you cannot watch it. The first few hours are when a thread is most shapeable, and an unattended open thread is exactly where a pile-on takes root. I posted mine and walked into a building where I could barely get a mobile signal.
Then the rest of the rules: appoint who is moderating and for how long. Agree the screenshot-then-delete rule in advance, so removing hate is a process, not a panic. Block bad-faith accounts without guilt. Pin one or two prepared comments that restate your position and your ask, rather than getting drawn into a hundred individual arguments.
Remember the boundary rule: you owe hate no airtime, and every reply you give it lifts it into more feeds, including the feeds of the people you are trying to protect. Keep your stand and your ask visible. Starve the pile-on of oxygen.
Stage four. Protect the people.
The team member whose identity or visibility makes them most useful to the cause is also the one most exposed by it.
That is not random, and it is not theirs to absorb alone. Name who is most at risk before you post. Make sure the hostile comments are being handled by more than one person. Build in a check afterwards: has anything that arrived stayed with anyone? Take the platform break if it is needed. The work is too important to lose people to silent burnout, and a stand that costs you your bravest colleague has not been worth it.
Decide, frame, hold, protect. You may not need a new policy document, yet. You need these four moves in muscle memory, so the next time your mission calls for a voice, the decision is already half made.
Template: The Visible Ally Planner
Complete this before your organisation takes a public position on a contested issue. One sheet per stand. The format does not matter. The discipline does.
1. The issue, in one sentence:
[What are we taking a position on, stated plainly.]
2. The mission link:
[Why does our mission require, or clearly support, a public position here? If you cannot complete this line, stop. This may not be your stand to take.]
3. The single action we want from a reader:
[One ask. Email an MP, sign a thing, donate, share, change a policy. One.]
4. Who has signed this off internally:
[At least two people, one of them senior. Nobody carries a public stand alone.]
5. The messenger, and their risk level:
[Who is the face or voice of this? Does their visibility put them at additional risk? If yes, what protections are in place before we post?]
6. The three frame checks (tick when done):
Structural cause named, not just the harm
Agency of those affected centred, not victimhood
Messenger appropriate, or protected if at risk
7. Moderation rules, agreed before posting:
Comment controls set to: [open / connections-only / off]
Moderator(s) on duty, and for how long:
Screenshot-then-delete rule confirmed: [yes / no]
Prepared pinned comment(s) drafted: [yes / no]
8. The boundary line we will hold:
[Write it down: we will not reply to bad-faith abuse, we will block and delete after screenshotting, we owe hate no airtime. Naming it in advance makes it easier to hold in the moment.]
9. Aftercare:
[Who checks in with the most exposed person, and when? Who has permission to step back from the platform if they need to?]
10. What we will measure:
[Tie it to the action, not the applause. MP emails sent, signatures, shares to the right rooms. Not whether the trolls went away.]
If a single post is trying to do two jobs, split it into two posts. One job per post is the simplest and most underused move in this entire newsletter.
AI Prompt: The "should we say something, and how" advisor
Use this when your organisation is weighing whether, and how, to take a public position on a contested issue.
Copy and paste the text below into your preferred AI tool. Works best in Claude or Gemini.
Replace [PLACEHOLDERS] with your content
For extra context, download my free Social Impact Storytelling Framework
(ogston.com/framework), then upload the PDF alongside this prompt. It will make the responses even more useful
Act as a strategic adviser to a UK charity or social impact team that is deciding whether to take a public position on a contested or politically sensitive issue. Your job is to help the leadership make a clear-eyed decision and, if they choose to speak, to do it in a way that serves their mission and protects their people. You are not a cheerleader and you are not a brake. You are a clear thinking partner. You will not write the final post in this pass; you are helping them decide and shape. Even if I paste a finished draft post below, ask the six questions first and do not jump ahead to feedback.
Before you advise, ask me these questions and wait for my answers:
1. What is the issue, in one sentence?
2. What is your charity's mission, and how does this issue connect to it? Be specific. If the connection is weak, say so.
3. Who, specifically, are you worried about upsetting, and who are you hoping to reach or help?
4. Who would be the messenger (the named voice or face), and does their visibility put them at additional personal risk? Yes, no, or unsure.
5. What single action, if any, do you want a reader to take?
6. What is your honest worst case if you speak, and your honest worst case if you stay silent?
When I have answered, return your advice in this exact structure.
A. The mission test. State plainly whether this issue sits inside, adjacent to, or outside the organisation's mission, and therefore whether a public position is warranted, optional, or hard to justify. Give your reasoning in three sentences. If the position could breach UK charity-law limits on campaigning (for example, party-political activity), or could itself cause harm to a marginalised group, flag that here.
B. The two costs. Summarise the likely cost of speaking and the likely cost of silence, based on my answers. Name who bears each cost. Do not pretend either cost is zero.
C. The messenger check. Given my answer to question 4, assess whether the proposed messenger is right, and what protections should be in place before posting if they are at additional risk.
D. The frame. If speaking is warranted, give three framing principles specific to this issue: how to name the structural cause, how to centre the agency of those affected, and how to make the single action clear and easy.
E. The moderation plan. Recommend comment-control settings, a screenshot-then-delete-and-block stance, and one or two prepared pinned comments the charity could use to restate its position without getting drawn into individual arguments.
F. The aftercare note. One short paragraph on protecting the most exposed person before, during, and after.
G. Verdict. End with one of: SPEAK (mission requires it, here is the shape), SPEAK IF (warranted but conditions must be met first, list them), or HOLD (the mission link is too weak or the messenger too exposed; here is what would need to change). Do not default to caution: if a stand is genuinely warranted and a workable plan exists, say SPEAK.
Use UK British English. Be direct. I would rather you were honest than encouraging. If my answers are unclear or contradictory, stop and ask me to clarify before advising.
HERE IS THE CONTEXT:
[DESCRIBE YOUR SITUATION, OR PASTE A DRAFT POST IF YOU HAVE ONE]This is a decision-support prompt, not a drafting prompt. It pairs with Edition 18's pre-publish hostile-narrative checker: use this one to decide whether and how to speak, then run your actual draft through the Edition 18 prompt to close any doors before it goes out.
Something I don't normally do
I am going to do something this month that I haven't been able to do much this year, and open up a little of my time.
To mark Pride Month, I would like to spend an hour, one to one, with five of you, helping with your storytelling strategy. Whatever is stuck: the founder story you cannot start, the campaign that is not landing, the impact report full of numbers nobody feels. It does not need to be about anything LGBTQI+ at all. I just wanted to do something positive this month, and giving some of my time felt like the right way to do it.
The first five people to reply to this email and say you are interested can book an hour with me at a reduced rate of £95 plus VAT. Once the five are taken, I will hold any others for another time.
Just hit reply and tell me you would like one.
Final thoughts
If this edition landed for you, the most useful thing you can do is forward it to the person at your organisation who keeps saying "we agree with it, we just can't be seen to say anything in public". That sentence is usually carrying more fear, and more cost, than the team realises. Read it together. Decide on purpose, not by default.
If they want to join the list properly, they can do so here: www.impactstoryteller.org
And remember, if you are sitting on a stand your mission calls for but fear has parked, hit reply this week. I read every single one.
Until next week, please take care.
Warm regards,
Matt Mahmood-Ogston
Award-winning impact storyteller, photographer and charity CEO.
Follow me on LinkedIn
A few ways you can work with me
Pride Month offer: An hour of one-to-one storytelling-strategy consultancy at £95 plus VAT, for the first five readers who reply. Hit reply to claim one.
Free: Download my Social Impact Storytelling Framework ogston.com/framework
Paid: Book me as your social impact photographer - perfect photos for impact reports, campaigns, websites and socials. Charity-friendly rates.
