How Our Campaign Strategy Doubled Donations

Summary

ToTheFullest partnered with XENION, a Berlin-based human rights organisation supporting refugees and survivors of political persecution, to design the social media mechanics behind their 2024 Christmas campaign “ZusammenWachsen”. Together with the band BUKAHARA and director Susanne Frericks, the core idea was to turn a specially written song, an intimate release concert at Berghain and a music video into a fully fledged, digital‑first fundraising campaign.

Instead of paid media, we relied entirely on an organic campaign architecture across Instagram and Facebook. In just one month, the campaign reached more than 43,000 unique people and generated over 6,200 interactions, with around 4,700 different accounts actively engaging with the content. That translates into an organic unique engagement rate of 10.7% and an average contact frequency of over five touchpoints per person – numbers that are hard to buy even with media budget.

XENION grew its Instagram community by 473% during the campaign and raised more than €25,600 in donations within roughly a month. All of this happened in the most competitive fundraising window of the year, surrounded by large NGOs with significant ad spend.

Our Work

XENION came to us with a clear ambition: increase donations and build long‑term awareness for psychosocial support for refugees, not just run another Christmas appeal. Our role was to design a social‑media‑first campaign mechanic that could connect BUKAHARA’s fan base with XENION’s mission and keep people engaged over several weeks – entirely organically.

Designing the campaign mechanic

Rather than pushing a single fundraising video, we mapped the campaign into four phases: teaser & ticket raffle, educational storytelling, live concert coverage and the final music‑video release. Across these phases we planned 59 content pieces, 38 of them unique, spanning reels, posts, stories and carousels.

At the heart of the mechanic was a repeating story loop on Instagram Stories:

Campaign hook / personal statement → deeper content (interview, data or behind‑the‑scenes) → repost or teaser → clear call to donate

This rhythm made sure that every attention spike – whether from the raffle, the concert or the video – automatically pulled people back to XENION’s work and the donation ask.

Connecting culture and cause

Together with BUKAHARA we built the campaign around “Alleinland”, a song written specifically for XENION, and an exclusive release show in the hall at Berghain. The only way to attend was through a small ticket raffle promoted via co‑authored reels and posts between XENION and BUKAHARA, turning the band’s reach into a powerful multiplier for the NGO.

The content mix combined:

• emotionally driven teasers and performance clips

• interviews with XENION’s leadership and a client sharing her story of fleeing Afghanistan

• a data‑driven “Spotify Wrapped”–style post visualising key figures from the national psychosocial care report

This blend of culture and context made it easy for people to both feel the issue and understand it.

Driving unique engagement without media budget

We deliberately optimised for unique engagement instead of sheer impressions. Co‑authored posts activated both communities at once, while the story loops kept resurfacing the same themes in different formats. As a result, the campaign built an average contact frequency of 5.54 – on a purely organic basis.

In total, the campaign achieved:

• 43,763 unique accounts reached

• 242,480 total impressions

• 6,272 interactions (likes, comments, shares, saves, profile taps, link clicks)

• 4,698 uniquely engaged accounts (roughly one in ten people reached took action.)

Sentiment analysis across comments and DMs showed an almost exclusively positive to enthusiastic response: people shared their own migration experiences, expressed gratitude for XENION’s work and explicitly mentioned making or planning donations.

Turning insights into a roadmap

Beyond day‑to‑day campaign steering, we developed a detailed Insights & Impact report covering reach, engagement, follower growth, donation performance and qualitative sentiment. The report concluded with strategic recommendations for XENION’s future campaigns – such as expanding their network of high‑reach multipliers and implementing more granular UTM and link tracking to attribute donations across channels.

For us, #ZusammenWachsen became a proof point that thoughtful campaign mechanics can compete with big media budgets – especially when culture, storytelling and rigorous measurement pull in the same direction.

About XENION

XENION – Psychosoziale Hilfen für politisch Verfolgte e.V. is a Berlin‑based human‑rights organisation and treatment centre for refugees and survivors of torture, war and other severe human rights violations. Founded in 1986, XENION provides psychotherapeutic treatment, psychosocial counselling, mentoring programmes and social support for particularly vulnerable refugees, and is part of broader regional and national networks for specialised refugee care.

This case positions ToTheFullest squarely in the space between strategy, culture and social impact – using precise campaign design to turn attention into tangible support.