In Ramadan 2019, revenue from Qatar Charity’s online platforms grew 70% on the previous Ramadan. Our team planned and ran the digital campaign behind that season: the data, the media, the measurement and the conversion work on the charity’s websites and apps.
The campaign ran under one idea,#رمضان_أجمل_هدية, “Ramadan, the most beautiful gift”, and it was built to do two jobs at once: reach new donors across Qatar and the region, and make giving easier for the donors Qatar Charity already had.
Qatar Charity · Ramadan 1440 / 2019 · Results
Qatar Charity digital campaign report, Ramadan 2019. Growth figures compare with Ramadan 2018.
Planning started in January, from the donors’ own data
Preparation began in January, four months before Ramadan. We started with Qatar Charity’s own records: how donors had behaved in the Ramadans of 2016, 2017 and 2018, day by day and cause by cause. The pattern was the same in every year. Donations rose through the month and were highest in the last ten nights, and sponsorships and sadaqah led every other cause by number of donations.
That analysis set the plan: which causes to lead with, when to spend, and which search keywords the charity had to own. Lessons from earlier campaigns went into the strategy, and the tools for analysis, ad management and measurement were booked before launch.
- Donor behaviour in past Ramadans analysed
- Lessons from earlier campaigns turned into the plan
- Analysis, ad management and measurement tools booked
- Target search keywords chosen
- Websites and apps connected to analytics
- One hashtag for the season
- Premium placements on YouTube, Twitter and Snapchat
- Programmatic display and video on DV360
- Heatmaps on the Ramadan page
- Pages and app journeys improved for conversion
- Email, SMS and push to existing donors
A first for Qatar Charity: programmatic advertising on DV360
For the first time, Qatar Charity advertised through Display & Video 360, Google’s programmatic platform for large advertisers. It let the campaign find new audiences by behaviour and by the content they were reading, cap how often one person saw the ads, show messages in a planned sequence, and keep every placement in line with the charity’s policies through DV360’s brand-safety controls.
Campaign report, slide on advertising capabilities.
One idea for the season
#رمضان_أجمل_هديةwas more than a slogan. In cooperation with Twitter in the Middle East, a dedicated emoji appeared next to Qatar Charity’s name and the campaign hashtag, and for the first time the charity’s hashtag became a trend of the season. It reached 70 million people in 20 countries and drew 59,721 interactions. Qatar led the conversation by far, but the hashtag travelled to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Oman, Kuwait and Turkey.
Measured with Brand24, 1 May to 5 June 2019. Shares of interactions by platform as reported.
Twitter carried almost half of the conversation and Instagram a third. Almost none of it happened on the open web: the conversation lived on social platforms.
Buy the moment, then earn it
We booked four promoted trends inside Qatar to reach the target audience and new segments. They were seen 1,574,864 times, with a 3% engagement rate. Then the campaign started to earn its own attention: Qatar Charity appeared in Twitter’s trending list in Qatar 4 times, and its apps appeared 4 times in the App Store’s trending searches during Ramadan.
Paid
- Promoted trends in Qatar
- 4
- Views
- 1,574,864
- Engagement rate
- 3%
Earned
- Times in Twitter’s trending list
- 4
- Times in the App Store’s trending searches
- 4
- Hashtag interactions
- 59,721
Campaign report. Earned trends were captured as screenshots of Twitter and App Store trending lists in Qatar during Ramadan.
The placements every user sees
Some placements reach a whole country in a day. We booked YouTube’s homepage masthead in Qatar four times, so the campaign appeared to every YouTube user in the country on YouTube’s homepage. The masthead ads were viewed 24.1 million times and clicked 350,129 times. On Snapchat, a Ramadan filter and an interactive lens were viewed 1019 thousand times and shared at a 1.7% rate.
Campaign report, YouTube masthead and Snapchat slides.
Across every platform, the season ran 120 campaigns and 490 ads. The ads were viewed 50 million times and the videos 3.6 million times, and ad reach and views grew 150% on the previous Ramadan. The social channels grew too, by about 18 thousand new followers in the month.
Campaign report, contribution of digital marketing to follower growth.
Where the giving happened: websites and apps
Media brings people to the door. What happens next decides the result. We connected Qatar Charity’s websites and apps to the analytics platforms, watched how donors used the Ramadan page with heatmaps, and applied a growth hacking approach to pages and journeys to raise the conversion rate.
The website welcomed 683 thousand visitors in Ramadan, 48% of them new. The apps told a different story. The iPhone app converted 19% of its users and the Android app 15%, against 6% on the website: about 3 times the website’s rate.
Campaign report, websites and apps indicators. Each platform reports conversion in its own analytics tool, so compare the rates as directional.
Our reading: the reason is not the technology. The people who open a charity’s app are usually its most committed donors, already signed in, already trusting, a tap away from giving. In Qatar, 82% of them used an iPhone. For a charity with a loyal base, the app is where Ramadan giving is easiest.
The direct line to donors
Alongside the paid media, the campaign kept talking to people who already knew Qatar Charity: 25 app notifications, 15 emails to 80 thousand subscribers, 11 SMS messages and 10 browser notifications.
Campaign report, notifications and direct messages.
The result: +70% online revenue
Qatar Charity’s report describes the season as unprecedented growth: more new donors, more new visits, and revenue from its online platforms up 70% on Ramadan 2018. That growth belongs to the whole Ramadan effort, from the charity’s projects and teams to its brand. The digital campaign’s part in it was clear: more people reached, 326 thousand new visitors to the website, and journeys built to turn them into donors.
Brand signals
Qatar Charity is one of the best known names in Qatar, and Google Trends shows searches for it rising every Ramadan, in 2019 as in 2018. We see no clear year-on-year lift in search, so we claim none. The brand signals of the season were different: a hashtag that trended for the first time, earned places in Twitter’s and the App Store’s trending lists, and 18 thousand new followers in a month.
What this means for your Ramadan campaign
Every charity has a Ramadan plan. These are the principles from this season that we bring to every Ramadan campaign we build.
Planning Ramadan, Zakat or Qurbani for Muslim donors? Book a call and we will show you how we would build it for you.
About this case study: our team ran this campaign for Qatar Charity in Ramadan 2019, before Wusul was founded in 2026. Figures come from the campaign’s digital report. Revenue growth is the report’s comparison of Qatar Charity’s online platforms with the previous Ramadan, and reflects the whole Ramadan effort, not advertising alone. Results are shown as rates, shares and counts; no money figures are published. Google Trends via DataForSEO, Qatar, weekly, 2017 to 2019, pulled November 2026.
