Help Razom was founded in Chicago on 26 February 2022 - two days after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. It started the way these things start: people who could not sit still, a Telegram group that passed three and a half thousand members within days, and a warehouse in Elk Grove Village filling up with donated supplies faster than anyone could sort them.
Everyone involved is a volunteer. The work is assembling medical kits and IFAKs, packing paramedic backpacks, sorting donations, and getting all of it onto planes and into shipping containers bound for Ukraine. Between 2022 and 2024 the organisation moved 160 tons by sea and over 110 tons by air - roughly $12.7 million of goods at market value.
We did the part we are useful for. Our team built the website and ran the marketing campaigns.
A nonprofit site in an active crisis has a narrower job than most marketing sites and a much less forgiving one. Someone arrives from a Telegram forward or an Instagram story, on a phone, with about fifteen seconds of attention and one question: is this real, and how do I help?
Everything followed from that. Donation paths at the top of every screen with no interstitial explaining the mission first. Recurring giving made as easy as one-time, because predictable monthly income is what lets an organisation commit to a shipment before the money is in. Real photography from the actual warehouse and the actual shipments - never stock, never illustration - because in a category where fraud is common, proof of work is the entire brand.
The other half was trust infrastructure: published reports, named partner organisations, itemised project pages showing what each fundraiser buys. Donors to a war relief effort do not want a mission statement. They want receipts.
Campaign work for a volunteer organisation is a different discipline from campaign work at a company. There is no budget, no media buy, and no one whose job it is to approve anything. What there is instead is a motivated community and an urgent, concrete need - which turns out to be a better starting position than most brands ever get.
Every lesson our team carries into lifecycle marketing work was cheaper to learn here. Specificity beats emotion, proof beats promise, and the follow-up message is worth more than the ask.
The numbers at the top of this page are not ours. They belong to the volunteers who spent their evenings and weekends packing boxes in a warehouse in Elk Grove Village, and to the people who gave money to strangers on the internet because they believed it would arrive. Our contribution was a website and a set of campaigns that helped that machine keep running.
It's here because it's the work we're proudest of, and because it's the clearest evidence we have of something a case-study deck can't show: that we can build the thing that is needed, quickly, with no budget and no brief, for people who are counting on it.