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In the Feed | What UK Charity Advertisers Need to Know Right Now | 11.09.26

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Last Updated on 11 September 2026

In the Feed is kmac digital’s roundup of digital advertising news for UK charity advertisers, now landing every two weeks. Estimated read time: 11 minutes.

A quick note before we start: from this edition, In the Feed is moving from weekly-ish to fortnightly. Q4 is the busiest stretch of the year for most of us in the sector, Christmas appeals, year-end asks, and the campaigns that go with them, and I’d rather send a tighter, more useful edition every fortnight than a rushed one every week. Same format, same sources, just landing in your inbox a little less often through the busy season.

In this week’s feed

Meta’s $18 billion child safety settlement (and TikTok’s $400 million one), and what they mean for the platforms charities rely on most

In late August, Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion (around £14 billion) to settle claims from 48 US states and territories that it knowingly designed Facebook and Instagram to be addictive to children and misled the public about the harm. It’s the largest settlement of its kind to date, and it’s worth understanding properly, because for most UK charities, Meta isn’t just another ad platform, it’s usually the single biggest channel for reaching and converting donors.

The two settlements are connected, not coincidental. Days earlier, TikTok separately agreed to pay $400 million (around £296 million) to the US Department of Justice over its own children’s privacy failures, specifically collecting data from under-13s without parental consent. Buried in the Meta deal is a clause that ties the two together directly: of Meta’s $18 billion, only $12.7 billion is guaranteed, the remaining $5.3 billion is contingent on Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube agreeing to similar financial penalties and platform changes. States are using the Meta settlement as leverage to pressure the rest of the industry into matching it. This isn’t just a Meta story, it’s the opening move in states going after every major platform charities advertise on.

The headline changes are US-specific for now: teen accounts will default to a two-hour daily limit across Facebook and Instagram combined, a midnight-to-6am usage curfew, and a check-in prompt every 15 minutes of continuous use, with a parent’s permission needed to switch any of that off. None of this is UK law, and Meta hasn’t said it’s rolling these specific mechanics out here, though the UK already has its own under-16 social media ban moving through Parliament, so the direction of travel is the same on both sides of the Atlantic.

The part worth paying closer attention to is what the settlement doesn’t touch. Meta does not have to stop personalised recommendations or targeted advertising, its core ad business model is untouched, and reporting on the small print shows Meta also secured the right to keep some data from under-13s specifically to train its own age-detection systems. So the near-term impact on your account targeting and delivery is close to zero.

This coordinated regulatory push against youth engagement across Meta, TikTok and potentially Snapchat and YouTube simultaneously, on top of the UK’s own under-16 plans, is less rosy for charities that do specifically need to reach younger audiences to deliver services and support.

My yhoughts:
The fallout is so much not about current campaigns, but potentially about future generation of donors.
While Facebook still reaches 89% of millennials and 74-80% of 30-64 year olds, with high daily engagement in those groups, Pew’s research shows teen Facebook use has collapsed, from 71% of US teens in 2014-15 to 32% now.

This might not be all bad news, eMarketer’s Gen Z data adds the key point: as Gen Z ages from teens into adults, they don’t consolidate onto fewer platforms, they expand, going from a median of five platforms as teens to six as adults, and Facebook specifically is used far more by Gen Z adults than Gen Z teens. A lot of that looks like people adopting Facebook later in life, for marketplace, groups, events and family reasons, rather than staying loyal to whatever they used at 15.

Snapchat is worth watching too, even though it isn’t named in this settlement. It already carries the largest teenage user base of any of these platforms and has its own history of child-safety scrutiny, its Family Center parental controls date back to 2022, so it wouldn’t surprise me to see it drawn into the next round.

What this might mean for you:

  • Nothing needs to change in your account today, this doesn’t alter targeting, delivery or reporting in the UK right now.
  • If your work depends on reaching supporters over the next decade rather than this quarter, youth-facing charities, challenge-event recruitment aimed at under-25s, student giving, it’s worth a conversation with your leadership team about how reliant that long-term pipeline is on any single platform staying popular with teenagers.
  • Don’t assume this is a Meta-only question. If Snapchat or YouTube reach settlements, or TikTok’s contingent obligations under the Meta deal kick in, the same open question about future audience loyalty applies to those platforms too.

(Source: NPR · Washington Post · TechCrunch · Pew Research Center · eMarketer)

How to get comms and fundraising working together on paid social, instead of pulling against each other

CharityComms published a piece recently on a familiar tension: fundraising wants social content that drives income, comms wants content that protects the brand, and paid social budgets often sit awkwardly between the two, with neither team feeling fully in control of it. It’s not new advice, but it’s a good prompt to actually check whether your own set-up has this problem, because the cost of not fixing it shows up directly in your ad accounts: inconsistent messaging, tracking the wrong KPIs, not leveraging the data you’ve got sitting ready to engage or conevrt, etc.

If that sounds familiar, here’s a practical way to fix it rather than just naming the problem.

  • Put paid social spend on a single shared calendar, visible to both teams, not just organic content. If fundraising and comms are booking campaigns separately, this is where the conflict starts.
  • Agree one sign-off step for anything going into paid spend, so appeal wording and brand claims are checked once, by the right person, before money goes behind it, not after.
  • At your next campaign planning session, ask both teams directly what “success” looks like for that budget, income, reach, or both, so you’re not optimising the same creative for two different goals without realising it.
  • If budget ownership is the actual sticking point, agree a simple split (fundraising owns conversion campaigns, comms owns awareness and reach) rather than leaving it undefined. And to add from my end, engagement sits across both.

All this and more is extensively covered in the Good Pixels course and commnuity that is launching soon for early founder members cohort.

(Source: CharityComms)

What Andy Burnham’s social media strategy can teach you about sourcing better ad creative

Zoe Amar’s column looked recently at how Prime Minister Andy Burnham has built a huge following (over a million across Instagram and TikTok) through conversational, unscripted video rather than traditional media appearances. Her point for charity leaders: audiences respond to a real person talking plainly, not a corporate account broadcasting a message.

There’s a direct paid-media angle here, not just a comms one. Platforms increasingly reward and prioritise exactly this kind of unpolished, authentic footage in ad delivery, both Meta and TikTok’s algorithms favour creative that doesn’t look like an ad. If your charity’s chief executive, a frontline worker, or a supporter is already talking naturally on camera for organic content, that raw footage is often stronger paid creative than a scripted, branded appeal film, and it’s usually sitting in someone’s phone already rather than requiring a new production budget.

How to use this your end:

  • Before commissioning new ad creative, check whether your leadership or frontline team already has organic video that performed well. Test it as paid creative before writing a fresh script.
  • If you’re recording anything with a spokesperson this month, get a few unscripted, in-their-own-words takes as well as the polished version. Test both.

(Source: Third Sector, Zoe Amar)

Google’s auto-upgrading Search campaigns to AI Max this month, no opt-out for Ad Grants accounts

Google’s AI Max for Search reached general availability earlier this year, and there’s no opt-out, only a choice of when you migrate. From 1 September, Google started automatically upgrading any Search campaign using campaign-level Broad Match or standalone Automatically Created Assets onto AI Max, rolling out gradually through the month. Dynamic Search Ads still get a reprieve until February 2027, but broad match and auto-created assets are moving now, on the original timetable.

For Ad Grants accounts, this is worth taking seriously rather than filing under “Google mechanics.” Ad Grants has always required tighter keyword control than a standard paid account: specific, mission-relevant keywords, a minimum quality score, no single-word terms. AI Max pushes search term matching the other way, toward broader, AI-interpreted intent. If your account is still on campaign-level broad match or has standalone auto-created assets switched on, it can get swept into this automatic upgrade without you doing anything.

This sits alongside Google’s wider Limited Ad Serving policy, which now covers every Google Ads account and leans heavily on whether your website clearly shows who you are (see Quick notes below), so it’s worth treating September as a proper Ad Grants compliance check, not just an AI Max one.

The practical bit:

  • Check whether your account uses campaign-level Broad Match or standalone Automatically Created Assets. If it does, expect an automatic move to AI Max this month unless you’ve already migrated on your own terms.
  • Once migrated, review your search terms report against Ad Grants’ keyword specificity and landing page relevance requirements. AI Max can widen what your ads match to more than the Grant’s compliance rules are comfortable with.
  • Standard paid accounts on Target CPA or Target ROAS are less exposed on compliance grounds, but it’s still worth checking query reports after the migration lands.

If you’d rather hand your Ad Grants or paid Google Ads account to someone who lives in this day to day, that’s exactly what our Google Ads + Microsoft Ads service covers.

(Source: Google Ads Help · Search Engine Land)

Meta round-up

Three recent Meta changes, all worth a proper look if Meta is a channel you rely on.

Meta’s AI is now creating your conversion events for you, worth checking it’s tracking the right ones

Meta’s new Automatic Events feature uses AI to detect actions on your website, a button click, a form submission, and automatically creates standard events to track them, without you setting anything up manually. Any pixel created from 3 August 2026 onwards has this switched on by default. Meta gives you a dashboard showing what it’s created and why, and you can review and delete anything you don’t want.

This feeds directly into ad optimisation. If Meta auto-creates an event against the wrong action, a “share” click logged as a donate event, say, your Advantage+ campaigns start optimising towards a signal that isn’t actually a donation. That quietly skews who sees your ads and what you’re paying to reach them.

  • If you’ve set up a new pixel since early August, or you’re not sure whether this is switched on, check Events Manager for an “Automatic events” tab.
  • Review what’s been created against your actual donation, sign-up and registration actions, and delete anything mismatched.
  • Keep your manually configured events as the ones actually driving optimisation, don’t assume the automatic ones are accurate by default.

(Source: Meta Business Help Centre)

Meta’s dropping hard placement exclusions for “value rules” that can only turn a placement down, not off

Meta has removed the old placement checkboxes from ad sets. Previously, you could tick a box and hard-exclude a placement entirely, no Audience Network, Instagram-only, iOS-only, that kind of set-up. That option is gone. In its place, Meta now offers “value rules”, which let you cut your bid on an underperforming placement by up to 90%, but you can no longer switch a placement off completely.

For charities this matters more than it sounds. If you’ve deliberately excluded Audience Network because it historically brought in low-quality clicks or poor donation completion rates, or you run Instagram-only ad sets for brand reasons, or iOS-only ad sets because Android conversion tracking is weaker for your donation flow, that hard exclusion is being taken away from you. A 90% bid reduction still means some spend can land on a placement you specifically didn’t want.

  • Check your active ad sets for any hard placement exclusions you’re currently relying on (Audience Network, Instagram-only, iOS-only, or similar).
  • Where you find one, set up the closest equivalent value rule now rather than waiting for it to matter, a 90% bid cut is the strongest control available going forward.
  • Keep an eye on placement-level performance for a few weeks after this changes in your account, since even a small share of spend leaking onto a previously-excluded placement can shift your blended cost per donation.

If you want this properly monitored and adjusted as part of ongoing management, that’s core to what I do as part of my Meta Ads for Charities service.

(Source: Meta for Developers)

WhatsApp marketing message pricing in the UK moves to standalone rates from 1 October

WhatsApp marketing message pricing in the UK is changing again. From 1 October, marketing messages move to their own standalone rate, separate from the per-message pricing structure that came in on 1 July. This is the second WhatsApp pricing change in three months, so if you budgeted around the July rates, don’t assume they still hold into Q4.

For any charity using WhatsApp Business for supporter updates, appeal reminders, or conversational fundraising asks, this affects your cost per message sent from 1 October, which flows straight into your cost per response and, ultimately, your cost per donation through the channel.

  • Check with your WhatsApp Business provider (or whoever manages this for you) for the updated standalone marketing rate before 1 October.
  • If WhatsApp is a meaningful part of your Q4 or Christmas appeal communications plan, rebudget for it now rather than after the first invoice under the new rate. Our WhatsApp for Charities guide has more on using the channel well if you’re newer to it.

(Source: Meta Newsroom)

This week’s Google Ads tip

If your account is split across five or six separate search campaigns, that might be working against you rather than for you. Smart Bidding strategies like Target CPA and Target ROAS learn from conversion data, and when that data is spread thin across lots of campaigns, each one becomes data-poor and the algorithm ends up guessing rather than learning. The fix isn’t a setting, it’s structure: consolidate into fewer campaigns and use ad groups to organise by service or programme, only splitting into a separate campaign when there’s a genuine reason, brand versus non-brand, different geotargeting, or a dedicated budget split. An account with one well-fed search campaign getting 60 conversions a month will usually outperform six campaigns getting 10 each.

Quick notes

  • Google’s Limited Ad Serving policy now covers every Google Ads account, throttling impressions (not rejecting ads outright) for advertisers whose website doesn’t clearly show who they are. It applies to Ad Grants accounts as much as paid ones, so it’s worth checking your charity name, number and About page are visible before impressions quietly decline for no obvious reason. (For the wider rules on keeping a Grant account in good standing, see our Google Ad Grants for Charities: The Complete Guide.) (Source: Google Ads Help · Search Engine Land)
  • ⚠️ Ofcom’s consultation on its new Fraudulent Advertising Code of Practice closes 2 October. The draft code would put a legal duty on major platforms to catch more impersonation ads, including fake donation pages and cloned appeals using a real charity’s name. If you’ve reported an impersonation ad or fake collection page and had a slow response, this is a reasonable moment to flag it, Ofcom is gathering evidence now. (Source: Ofcom)
  • Meta is testing “Reply to Keywords”, which automatically DMs someone on Instagram when they comment a set keyword on your ad. Useful if your appeals get high comment volumes and you want to auto-send a donation link or sign-up form. Instagram-only for now, not yet on Facebook placements. (Source: Meta for Developers)
  • Meta acquired a Swedish AI startup to build AI-powered commerce agents. It is early infrastructure, not a product you can use yet, but it points at where WhatsApp and Messenger are heading: AI agents that can complete a transaction, including a donation, inside a chat. If your charity uses WhatsApp Business for supporter conversations, this is the direction that channel is likely to go. (Source: Digital Women · Meta)
  • Pandora has rebuilt its marketing strategy around cultural experiences rather than product, aimed at Gen Z. If you’re trying to reach younger donors or challenge-event participants, it’s a reminder that experience-led creative tends to land better with this audience than a straightforward ask, the same point the Andy Burnham story above makes. (Source: Digital Women)
  • A short, visible “processing” moment can make a result feel higher quality, even when it’s identical to an instant one. Nudge Newsletter’s Phill Agnew cites a 2022 study where people rated a recommendation 52% higher quality after a seven-second loading wheel than when it appeared instantly. Worth testing on donation or sign-up confirmation screens, a brief “processing your donation…” state before the thank-you page loads may build more trust than showing it instantly. (Source: Nudge Newsletter, Phill Agnew)

Have questions about how any of this affects your campaigns? Get in touch.

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