--- title: "Your questions answered: Using humour to bypass the trolls with The Climate Coalition" date: 2026-10-06T11:34:58Z modified: 2026-10-06T16:23:03Z permalink: "https://forwardaction.uk/blog/your-questions-answered-using-humour-to-bypass-the-trolls-with-the-climate-coalition/" type: post status: publish excerpt: "" wpid: 4005 categories: - Blog - Webinar tags: - Blog - Webinar - Campaigning - Creative - Strategy - Testing + Optimisation featured_image: /wp-content/uploads/2026/10/gbgw2.jpeg featured_image_alt: A hessian banner printed with the Great Big Green Week logo hangs among tall purple delphiniums in a sunny garden. timestamp: 2026-10-06T16:23:03Z --- ##### Last week, Helen Meech (Executive Director at The Climate Coalition) joined Helen Hector (Forward Action’s Strategy Director) for our webinar, ‘Using humour to bypass the trolls: Lessons from the Great Big Green Week paid social campaign’. They shared how Great Big Green Week used playful, community-rooted ads to reach people who would normally scroll straight past climate content – driving 67,000 people to the Great Big Green Week website, 85% of them new visitors, at 16p per landing page view. There were so many brilliant questions that we couldn’t get to them all live. So here are the answers – from targeting and trolls, to budgets and bringing senior stakeholders on board with humour. If you missed the session, you can [watch the webinar recording and read the key takeaways here](http://forwardaction.uk/wp-content/uploads/wp-mfa-exports/post/reaching-new-audiences-with-paid-social-lessons-from-great-big-green-week.md). #### Targeting ##### “_**How did you set up your targeting for the paid social campaign, and how did you make sure it reflected the two specific audiences you wanted to reach?**_“ We used audience targeting for both the concept test and the main paid social campaign, getting as close as Meta allows to our two segments – rooted patriots and traditional conservatives. Here’s how we set it up: - **Interests as proxies.** Meta has restricted how far you can narrow by interest, so we chose interests that line up with each segment – like community organisations and gardening. - **Broad demographics.** We left gender open and set age to 30–65+, to reach the people most likely to come along to a Great Big Green Week event. We knew this wouldn’t be watertight. - **Careful exclusions.** We excluded anyone who followed or had engaged with The Climate Coalition on Meta, anyone who had visited the Great Big Green Week website, and their full email list. - **Separate ad sets per audience.** This let us see how each segment responded to different framings and creative. And they did respond differently: rooted patriots had a lower cost per click, while traditional conservatives were more likely to click through to find a local event. Just as important: the creative did a lot of the targeting for us. Meta is increasingly good at finding the right people, so if your content is genuinely built for your audience, the algorithm will find the people who respond to it. The creative is the targeting. ##### “**_Did you aim to match the people featured in the videos to the demographics of your target audiences, including representation across social classes?_**“ We tried to build in as much diversity as possible. But because we were relying on volunteers from community groups to take part, it largely came down to who was available and willing. #### Creative ##### **_“Did you proactively involve people from your target audiences in the ideation process? In my experience, NGO staff can find it challenging to genuinely start from the values of people who don’t share their outlook.”_** It’s hard – most people working in NGOs tend to be progressive activists, and we were very aware of that. We had a limited budget, so we didn’t bring the target audience into the ideation directly. Instead, we put the Britain Talks Climate and Nature research front and centre in the ideation session, and asked everyone to bring examples of content they’d seen work for these audiences. We also built synthetic AI audiences based on [More in Common’s Shattered Britain segments](https://www.moreincommon.org.uk/seven-segments) to help develop the creative. This was really useful – we changed the ad captions based on what we learned. Then the targeted test ads gave us live feedback on whether the ideas were landing with the people we wanted to reach. If you can make it happen, we’d highly recommend involving your audience directly – focus groups to understand issues and framings, and live testing of digital content to see how people react. But what people say they’ll do and what they actually do are often different. Testing in the real world is the best indicator of whether people will engage and act with you. ##### **_“How do you convince senior stakeholders that humour is the right approach when they’re worried about risk or causing offence? And how do you introduce it if your organisation isn’t known for humour, without it feeling jarring to existing supporters?”_** **Bringing stakeholders on board** Start by using whatever autonomy you have to create small-scale content and test it, so you can share results alongside the content itself. Make sure the humour is never aimed at your audience, or at people affected by your cause – get feedback, or even better, co-create humorous content with people with lived experience. And have a plan for rolling it out slowly, watching comment sentiment and evaluating risk as you go. Paid ads help here, even on a small budget, because they can easily be turned off – unlike organic posts. **Introducing humour when it’s new for your organisation** A new channel, like TikTok, can give you space to try a different approach with a new audience – and the algorithm will find the people most likely to engage with it. It’s also worth remembering that lots of organisations that use humour run plenty of campaigns without it. Ringfencing it to a particular appeal or campaign, so it feels more standalone, can be a good approach rather than dropping it into your ongoing email and social programmes. #### **Comments and trolls** ##### **_“Facebook’s algorithm tends to amplify climate content that could be seen as controversial, which attracts trolls. Did you face similar challenges – and is it proven that responding to the comments you want people to see pushes them up the thread?”_** We see trolling across lots of issues on paid social, and anything that feels particularly “climate-y” attracts its share. There are no quick fixes, and it’s now part of being on social media – but there are practical things that help: - **Filter, hide or switch off.** You can hide comments you don’t want people to see, or turn comments off if they’re becoming too distressing or distracting on your ads. - **Boost the good stuff.** Yes, replying to a comment does push it up the thread. The Climate Coalition were great at responding positively to people who mentioned nature and climate, or were already on the right track guessing what was going on. That steered the whole conversation that way, helped people get the real issue and set a positive tone. - **Lean on your community.** Supporters counteracting negativity is brilliant when it happens. You can’t conjure it up, but encourage it where you can. - **Look after your moderators.** Share the load, make sure the people moderating are supported, and be kind to yourselves – reading that every day is hard. - **Root content in people and place.** Great Big Green Week content tends to get trolled less than some of The Climate Coalition’s other content, because it’s about everyday people making the places they live better. ##### **_“What was the split between positive and neutral comments?”_** Overall, 96% of comments were positive or neutral. We don’t have the exact split, but from memory the majority were neutral (mostly people guessing what was going on or replying to other comments), and more than 15% were positive. #### **Landing page and onward journey** ##### **_“How did you manage data capture for ads that included an action?”_** There was no data capture goal for this campaign. The aim was to reach and engage new audiences, and leave them feeling interested and open to going to a Great Big Green Week event. So we optimised the ads for clicks on the landing page button to find an event nearby. ##### **_“What optimisations did you make during the campaign?”_** We set ourselves a target of a 5% click-through rate on the landing page’s event finder button, and hit it by the end of the campaign – but it took quite a lot of optimisation to get there. The biggest change was on the landing page itself. It started with our reveal videos, but very few people watched them all the way through, and even fewer scrolled down to the button. So we made the hard decision to replace them with an 8-second GIF that does the same reveal, which lifted the rate of people clicking to find an event. We still use the videos on organic social, so they’ve still had lots of reach. We also started burning through the budget really quickly, so we made alterations as we went. Having really clear success measures was important here, so we could optimise the spend we did have. Next time, we’d look to push the event finder click-through rate even further. #### ****Production and budget**** ##### **_“How did you recruit people to feature in the videos – were they paid, or volunteers supported with a brief?”_** It was a mix. We used some paid actors for the ads, alongside volunteers. The reveal videos all featured real volunteers and staff from Hackney Repair Cafe and the London Wetland Centre. We also worked with a film production team, [Flint](https://www.flintsocial.co.uk/), who specialise in social-first video. That isn’t essential, but it definitely helped us meet the brief. ##### **_“What do “low budget”, “quickly” and “cheaply” mean in practice? And does the £500–1,000 figure cover the film crew and actors – if not, what did filming cost?”_** When we say low budget and cheaply, we mean we filmed the test videos ourselves – using CCTV cameras we already had, or our phones, and going out as a team to shoot what we wanted to test. We did use voiceover artists for one concept, to do it justice. We then put £500–1,000 behind the concepts on Meta – enough to get them in front of enough people to see realistically whether they’d click and engage (for testing the initial concepts only – it didn’t cover the crew or actors). Clicks show interest, but you want to see how far people will go. So send them to a simple landing page with the action you ultimately want them to take – a donation, a sign-up or a petition. A tool like Typeform, or another free platform, makes this quick and easy (ours took about an hour to set up), or you can use your own platform if you have the skills in your team. It doesn’t need to look polished; it just needs to do the job. There’s still a time and resource cost, but a test like this can be done in less than a week – and it doesn’t have to cost a lot. Once we had a winning concept, the ad videos cost around £5,000. That covered the film crew, three to four actors and all edits, plus two days filming the two reveal videos and their edits. #### ******Using big tech platforms****** ##### **_“How do you handle concerns about advertising on Meta and Google, given the role these platforms play in the problem?”_** Deciding whether to use big tech to reach and mobilise the public is a tricky call, and one every organisation has to weigh up. Many of our partners do use these platforms, because they help them find and build a supporter base – and then move those people into direct channels like email, SMS, phone or post, where the relationship can grow. We also support organisations to run relational organising projects, where supporters are mobilised and supported to have conversations with their friends, family and online networks. This can be incredibly powerful for shifting narratives, attitudes and behaviours – and it sidesteps some of those big tech concerns. --- Thank you to everyone who joined us live, and to Helen Meech and the whole Climate Coalition team for so generously sharing what worked, what didn’t, and everything in between. Want to reach audiences beyond your core supporters – or test a bolder idea before you scale it? Get in touch, we’d love to help. [Get in touch](http://forwardaction.uk/wp-content/uploads/wp-mfa-exports/page/contact.md) ## Topics **Categories:** [Blog](http://forwardaction.uk/wp-content/uploads/wp-mfa-exports/taxonomy/category/blog.md), [Webinar](http://forwardaction.uk/wp-content/uploads/wp-mfa-exports/taxonomy/category/webinar.md) **Tags:** [Campaigning](http://forwardaction.uk/wp-content/uploads/wp-mfa-exports/taxonomy/post_tag/campaigning.md), [Creative](http://forwardaction.uk/wp-content/uploads/wp-mfa-exports/taxonomy/post_tag/creative.md), [Strategy](http://forwardaction.uk/wp-content/uploads/wp-mfa-exports/taxonomy/post_tag/strategy.md), [Testing + Optimisation](http://forwardaction.uk/wp-content/uploads/wp-mfa-exports/taxonomy/post_tag/testing-optimisation.md), [Webinar](http://forwardaction.uk/wp-content/uploads/wp-mfa-exports/taxonomy/post_tag/webinar.md)