The Ramadan runway · for Muslim charities
Take what your email raised last Ramadan. Now assume a third of the people you sent it to never saw it.
What was that third worth?
Not deleted. Not ignored. Never delivered anywhere they would look. For most charity lists that have been sending for a few years with nobody minding the sending side, a third is a conservative guess. The work that recovers it is repaired at the pace the inbox providers allow, in weeks, not days. Ramadan 1448 begins around 8 February 2027, which is why this page exists in August.
Ramadan begins
around Mon 8 Feb
Last ten nights
from around Sat 27 Feb
The 27th night
evening of around Fri 5 Mar
Eid al-Fitr
around Tue 9 Mar
Dates for Ramadan 1448 are moon-dependent. We confirm a week out and hold a one-day variant of every send.
The six months
February is decided in the autumn
Each month on the runway does one job, and none of them can be done in January.
We read the account and fix the sending set-up so your mail arrives.
Everything else is decoration if the appeal lands in junk.
Clean and segment. We separate your openers from the addresses quietly costing you.
Dead addresses are what taught the inbox providers to distrust the list.
Warm carefully, smallest and warmest first. The winter appeal is the live test.
Reputation repairs at the providers' pace, not ours.
Widen. Year-end giving, the first revenue read, the dress rehearsal.
Make the mistakes before the season that matters.
Re-introduce, re-permission, prime Zakat. Build and approve the full sequence.
Writing thirty emails in late January is how charities end up sending nine.
Ramadan. Reflective sends first, then daily through the last ten nights, the 27th night, Eid.
The payoff. The work happened months earlier.
The month after
Every charity knows what Ramadan raised. Almost none know what happened to those donors by June.
Across the sector, around nineteen in every hundred first-time donors ever give again. Read it the other way round: you spend the most expensive month of your year bringing people in, and four in five are gone by the summer. Next February, you pay to bring them in again.
That is not carelessness. April has no budget line. The charities that break out of this write April before Ramadan starts: three emails, written in January when there is time, scheduled before the season begins, left to run while everyone recovers. We build that month into every Ramadan programme we run.
The thank you
It says what the money actually did, and it is sent while the feeling is still there.
The impact note
Six weeks later. One photograph, one number.
The quiet invitation
A single ask to give monthly, phrased as carrying on rather than starting something new.
The cheapest growth available to a charity, and the first thing to fall off the list, every single year.
Where to start
Diagnosis before price, always
The free read and the pilot carry their prices here. The three packages are priced to your list size in a fifteen-minute call, and payment can spread across the runway months if that sits better in your financial year.
The free read
Seven checks on your email channel, your own numbers, and one of your own emails rebuilt beside the original so you can see exactly what we would change and why. If your channel is healthy, we tell you so and leave you be.
Freeno charge, no strings
Read my channel, freeThe pilot, thirty days
One campaign, built and sent. Your segmentation reviewed. The deliverability work done. A full reporting pack at the end. It closes by itself: no renewal, no notice, nothing to cancel. You will know inside a month whether we are any good, and the runway is still open in October.
Ready
Priced in the fifteen-minute call
Six months, September to January. We fix the sending set-up so your emails arrive, clean and segment the list, warm the people who have stopped opening, and grow the part that engages. Monthly reporting you can hand straight to trustees. You write and run your own Ramadan, on a list in a very different state to the one you have now.
For charities with someone who can run a campaign, and nobody who can fix deliverability.
Ready and Run
Priced in the fifteen-minute call
Everything in Ready, and we run the season. January priming. Reflective sends through the first half. Daily through the last ten nights. The 27th night. Eid. Written, built, tested and sent, with your approval on every single one.
The full season, run by the people who fixed the list it lands on.
Ready, Run and Reach
Priced in the fifteen-minute call
Everything in Ready and Run, plus your appeal in front of the Garden Network's 600,000 UK Muslim donors during the season. Plus we stay through March and do the April work, converting one-off Ramadan donors into monthly supporters.
For charities who want the season to leave something behind.
Every engagement starts with a conversation. There is no buy button, here or anywhere on this site.
Proof
Stated plainly, caveat included
One account we took on this summer had Microsoft addresses opening at four to five in every hundred across the list. Two months of careful, recency-first sending later, the engaged part of that list opens at around half. Those are different groups of people, so it is not a like-for-like jump and we will not dress it up as one. What it shows is that Microsoft accepts and opens mail from that domain again. In April it did not.
The sector, this August
Of the eight largest Muslim charities in Britain, four have no DMARC record at all.
A fifth has one set to monitoring only, which reports problems and prevents none. Google made this a requirement for bulk senders in February 2024. Microsoft followed. This is not a small-charity problem. It is a sector problem, and almost nobody is looking at it.
We checked ours before writing this page. You can check yours in under a minute: here is how.
The deadline
30 September
The last sensible start, and not an invented one. Inbox providers change their mind about a sender over weeks, and January is spent building the sequence itself. Start in October, lose a month, still do well. Start in December and we are limiting damage, which we would rather say to you now than in December.
Asked by trustees
The four questions we are asked by name
→Is August not too early?
It is the only month the autumn can be bought in. Every agency sells Ramadan in January, and by January the only thing left to change is the wording. Whether the appeal reaches the inbox, and whether the list is bigger, was settled in the autumn.
The runway above is six months long because inbox providers change their mind about a sender over weeks, not days. That pace is theirs, and no budget moves it.
→We already have an agency.
Keep them. An agency writes the appeal. This work sits underneath it: whether the appeal arrives at all, and how many people it can arrive to. The Ready package exists for exactly this arrangement. We fix the list and hand it back, and your agency runs the season on a list in a very different state to the one you have now.
→What happens to our data?
We work as your processor, inside your own account, on your own domain, under a standard agreement your trustees can read before anyone signs anything. Your supporters never move onto another list. Nothing leaves the building without your approval.
Your time commitment is real but small: about two hours a month, nearly all of it approvals, plus one named person who can sign off a send inside two working days.
→What does the free read actually involve?
Seven checks on your email channel: whether your mail is set up to arrive, the health of the list, how it is segmented, the sending rhythm, the content itself, what runs automatically, and whether donations can be traced back to email at all. Your own numbers throughout. And one of your own emails rebuilt beside the original, so you can see exactly what we would change and why.
It is done by hand, in the order requests arrive, and if your channel is healthy we will tell you so and leave you be.
You can run one of the seven checks yourself in under a minute: look up the DMARC record on your own sending domain. If nothing comes back, Gmail and Microsoft are deciding for themselves what to do with email that claims to come from you. We wrote a plain-English guide to checking it.
Start here
The free read, or fifteen minutes
Ask for the free read and we will come back with a day for it. Ask for fifteen minutes and we will send times. Either way you deal with a person, requests are handled by hand in the order they arrive, and nothing is automated at this end.
Already replied to one of our letters? Then we have you, and there is nothing to fill in here.