Not Another Brother set to balance the promise of ‘reward’ with the reality of ‘risk’. Taking ISIL’s high production values, central ‘hero’ and sense of becoming part of a ‘band of brothers’, we created a counter-narrative that showed the true costs. The storyline was simple: no matter how much disseminating ISIL’s propaganda might make you feel that you’re part of an Islamist ‘brotherhood’, that reward is nothing compared with the risk of losing life as you know it.

The script presented a letter from a man apologising to his younger brother for setting him on the path to extremism, while the viewer saw the real fate of a jihadist: no heroics, just a grim, lonely exile, far away from your loved ones.

The integrated campaign was held together by #notanotherbrother – a rallying cry to encourage people to draw a line in the sand: no more brothers lost to ISIL.

Analysis showed a ‘Trojan horse’ approach would be most effective – mimicking ISIL’s own tactics of disseminating film on social media.

But some parts of the Muslim community were wary of ‘outside’ NGO’s, so the film was unbranded and launched via a single YouTube page and a deliberately lo-fi Wordpress page. The hashtag #notanotherbrother deliberately echoed how ISIL launch their films, creating a buzz within the ‘jihadist fanboy’ community to ensure it was watched.

The film was seeded within key networks in the Muslim community via Twitter (including tweets in Arabic) to start ground-level discussion before Quilliam’s involvement was revealed.

The carefully controlled PR narrative took the story global, ensuring that those people who did not feel at risk, but who could find themselves unexpectedly reached by ISIL's propaganda, were aware of both ISIL's approach and the counter narrative.

The campaign achieved a total reach of over half a billion people. In short, it succeeded in creating a colossal anti-ISIL presence where it had been seen as ‘winning the social media war.’

To date, the film has received nearly 30 million Twitter impressions globally and nearly 75,000 views on YouTube by people from nearly 200 countries; all from a £12,000 production budget and no paid media spend.

The United Nations are using the film as part of its global UNESCO work with children. UK schools are using it in their PHSE classes.

But most importantly, it is also changing minds. One former extremist emailed Quilliam and wrote “… #notanotherbrother made me cry. It made me realise that my words had turned our brothers into weapons.”