Owning Your Audience: A Call to Purpose-Driven Organisations

Every week, I watch organisations doing important work—charities, advocacy groups, purpose-driven businesses—pour their energy into platforms that are openly, verifiably designed to harm the people those organisations serve.

A Los Angeles jury has found Alphabet’s Google and Meta liable for damages in a landmark civil trial over youth social media addiction. Facebook's algorithms were found to amplify misinformation and incite violence in multiple countries. The company knew (read Careless People by a former employee). Meta's own research, made public by whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021, showed that Instagram worsened body image issues in teenage girls. TikTok has faced ongoing scrutiny over its effects on adolescent mental health and its data practices.

And yet, most purpose-driven organisations continue to maintain an active presence on these platforms. They pay for reach on platforms they do not control. They build communities on ground that can be taken away from them at any moment by an algorithm change, a policy shift, or the decision of a billionaire who has publicly stated that he prioritises engagement over truth.

You do not have a FB/Insta/TikTok following. You have a following that they let you talk to, on their terms, for as long as they choose.

I am asking you to think carefully about what that means for organisations whose mission includes the protection and amplification of vulnerable voices. And what it means for mental health.

The Case of Lush: A Bold Move

In November 2021, Lush Cosmetics made a significant decision. They left Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Snapchat—not as a stunt, but as a policy. They called it their Anti-Social Media Policy and published it in full.

The internal reaction at Lush was, by their own account, one of real concern. They had millions of followers and were walking away from direct access to a large audience. Their Chief Digital Officer, Jack Constantine, openly expressed genuine fears about losing reach.

What happened instead? Lush reported its strongest Christmas trading in two years in the weeks following the decision. UK retail sales in December 2021 reached £41.8 million—a 20% increase on the previous year. Physical store sales rose by 54.4%. In the 2022 financial year, the company reversed a £45 million loss and recorded a £29 million pre-tax profit.

By 2025, Lush had built a newsletter with more than 6 million global subscribers and an app with 1.75 million users—most of whom had actively opted into push notifications. These are audiences Lush owns outright. No algorithm stands between Lush and the people who want to hear from them. No platform can decide tomorrow that Lush's content will reach only 2% of followers unless they pay for the difference.

'Developments in recent months have reinforced and vindicated our decision to withdraw.' - Jack Constantine, Lush Chief Digital Officer, February 2025.

Constantine was responding to Meta's announcement that it was scaling back its fact-checking programme. The platform that had already shown it knew about the harms it was causing had just made itself less accountable, not more.

Constantine's phrase for what Lush had done is the one that matters: they stopped renting their audience. They started owning it.

Understanding Audience Ownership

You know what ‘owning your audience' means. The distinction between an owned audience and a rented one is simple, but its implications are significant.

A rented audience lives on someone else's platform. You can reach them only through that platform's tools, on that platform's terms, within that platform's definition of acceptable content.

If the platform changes its algorithm—which all of them do, often—your reach can fall overnight. If the platform decides your content violates its policies—however that is defined, and however inconsistently—your account can be restricted or removed. If the platform is acquired, banned, or simply declines, your audience connection disappears with it.

An owned audience is one you can contact without an intermediary. It is a list of people who have actively chosen to hear from you—an email subscriber list, a membership database, or a community on a platform you control. When you send a message to an owned audience, it arrives. No algorithm decides whether 4% or 40% of them see it.

For most organisations, this is not an either-or choice. The honest question is not whether to leave all social platforms immediately, but whether the current balance makes sense for an organisation that exists to serve people's interests.

If your communications strategy depends on renting reach from platforms that are demonstrably willing to cause harm to the communities you serve, that is a question worth asking plainly, in a board meeting, with evidence on the table.

My Practice: A Personal Reflection

I have been in communication in many iterations for a long time. My practice has worked without algorithmic intermediaries because the voices I prefer to work with are precisely those who have been made invisible by the structures that algorithms reflect and reinforce.

Recently, I worked with a migrant doing menial work because systemic barriers had shut her out of the institutions where her knowledge belonged. I helped her build an author identity and publish three books on subjects she alone chose. One of those books reached 68,000 followers on FB. But that following wasn't the result of paid promotion or algorithmic favour. It was the result of content responding to the urgent needs of mothers of children on the spectrum who couldn’t afford to pay for help.

That is an argument for thinking clearly about which platforms serve your mission and which ones use your mission to serve theirs.

I wouldn't advise any client to build their communications strategy on a foundation that could be taken from them or that requires them to remain complicit in demonstrable harm in order to reach the people they want to serve. The evidence from the organisations that have acted on the same stand suggests that, in the medium term, it's a strategically sound one.

What You Can Do: Building Your Own Infrastructure

Prioritise building communications infrastructure that you control. The practical checklist below is for anyone who wants to shift from rented reach to an owned audience. It does not require abandoning all social media. It requires focus on building the alternative—so that when the decision becomes necessary, the infrastructure already exists.

The Owned Audience Checklist

1. Grow Your Email List. This is your most important owned channel. Every person who gives you their email address and consents to receive communications from you is an audience member you own outright. Start a newsletter that is genuinely worth reading and is sent only when you have something important to say. Don’t overwhelm your audience. Use a platform that lets you export your list at any time—Mailchimp (free up to 500 contacts), MailerLite (free up to 1,000), or Beehiiv for larger growth.

   
   

2. Make Your Website the Primary Destination. Every piece of content you produce for a social platform should also live on your own website, in a form that can be found, linked to, and read without a login. Your website is the one place on the internet you fully control. Treat it accordingly.

   
   

3. Move Group Communication Off WhatsApp. The communities your organisation has built in WhatsApp groups are communities Meta hosts. If you need group communication, consider: Signal (up to 1,000 members, end-to-end encrypted by default, run by a non-profit, no advertising, no data harvesting); Telegram channels (unlimited subscribers for broadcast communications, though note that regular group chats are not end-to-end encrypted by default); Geneva (designed specifically for communities, end-to-end encryption throughout, topic-based channels, cleaner than a group chat).

   
   

4. Invest in Your Contact Database. A well-maintained CRM—even a simple spreadsheet of donors, supporters, and community members with permission to contact them—is worth more than 10,000 social followers you cannot reach without paying. Know who your audience is. Own the record.

   
   

5. Use Social Platforms for Discovery, Not Dependency. If you choose to maintain a presence on social media platforms, use them to direct people to channels you own—your newsletter sign-up, your website, your direct contact form. Treat social platforms as the top of a funnel that ends in a relationship you own, not as the relationship itself.

   
   

6. Know What You Would Lose if the Platform Disappeared Tomorrow. Ask this of every platform in your communications mix. If the answer is 'a significant part of our audience,’ you have a dependency that needs addressing. If the answer is 'nothing we can't rebuild,' your owned infrastructure is working.

   
   

A Note on This Website

You will not find Angeles on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok simply because I believe the people I work with deserve channels that are not designed to manipulate them. I must give up the short-term reach if I want to support migration en masse to new, ethical, local-law-abiding platforms that care about their participants’ wellbeing.

Part of my work is to help organisations find the gap between the story they intend and the story their communications actually tell. The gap between 'we exist to serve our community' and 'we build our community on Meta's infrastructure' is one worth naming.

If you are thinking about this question for your organisation—or if you have already started to act on it and want to talk through what the transition looks like—I would be glad to hear from you.

Angeles Reyes works with purpose-driven organisations on narrative strategy, voices empowerment, oral history, and communications alignment. The first step is a 30-minute diagnostic conversation.

Contact: angelesreyes.com/contact