Video-led giving.
Donation campaigns, on WhatsApp.

Charity inboxes are graveyards. Open rates on supporter mailings have been declining for a decade and now sit at ~22% for warm lists, with most of the action happening in the first hour and almost none after day two. WhatsApp opens are 98% with median read time under two minutes — but the real unlock is video.

WhatsApp auto-plays the first frame of a vertical video in the chat preview. Supporters see a face, a place, a moment, before they decide whether to engage. A short, human-shot video from a founder, beneficiary or campaigner outperforms a polished email appeal by orders of magnitude — because it doesn't feel like an appeal, it feels like the person on the ground sending you a note.

• 98% open rate on first WA video vs ~22% for cold email.
• 71% play-through rate — the autoplay preview is the ad.
• Vertical, captioned, <60s — the only spec that matters; phones are vertical and supporters watch on mute.
• Story before ask — the donate button is the last beat, not the first frame.

The five-step blueprint is the floor, not the ceiling. Every charity that runs this for more than one campaign ends up layering in segmentation, recurring giving and major-donor flows — and the lift compounds with each cycle.

• Recurring giving on the yes-branch — after the thank-you video, offer a one-tap monthly gift at 10% of the one-off amount.
• Major-donor split — supporters with lifetime giving > £500 land on a parallel track with a personal video from the CEO, not the appeal cadence.
• Match-funding ladder — pull match progress (e.g. match_remaining) into Video #3's caption to make urgency real.
• Gift Aid in-thread — collect the Gift Aid declaration as a Flow on the thank-you, not a separate email later.
• Multi-language video — submit the same template in EN/CY/GD for cause-specific regional appeals.
• Beneficiary social-proof carousel — Video #2 can be a short carousel of three 15-second clips instead of one 60-second piece.

The places charities get stuck are nearly always around video file size, donation-platform webhooks, and edge cases at the close of an appeal.

• Keep video <16 MB — Meta's hard limit; compress vertical 9:16 H.264 at ~3 Mbps.
• Submit templates 48 hours ahead — Meta's review for video templates is fast but not instant.
• Idempotent donation webhooks — Stripe / Enthuse retry on failure; key your exit branch on the donation event ID, not a property write.
• Honour STOP/UNSUBSCRIBE — write a global suppression branch; a re-asked supporter is a lost supporter.
• Quiet hours — clamp sends to 9–18 in the supporter's timezone; donation appeals at 11pm get reported.
• Match-end timing — schedule Video #3 to land 24 hours before the match-funding deadline, not the moment it closes.
• Gift-aid record — stamp gift_aid_consent_at on the contact at thank-you for HMRC audit trail.