Core messaging
The challenge with Common Seas was that there was always so much to say. What’s more, the subject matter was often complex, and needed precise language backed up with fact-checked evidence.
We needed a way to support employeses to easily stay ‘on message’ while communicating with their target audiences about whatever was happening.
I worked with team leads across the organisation to create message houses – both for Common Seas as a whole and for each individual project. These acted as a flexible framework that anyone could draw on to support their communication.
I used the message houses for everything from presentations and pitches, to the web copy pictured here.
They were also used by people across the organisation to keep our outreach consistent and credible – whether we were talking about education with schoolteachers or diaper programmes with government representatives.
We wanted Common Seas to connect with a mainstream citizen audience. It was important that both our theory of change, and the projects we were working on, cut through and made sense to as many people as possible.
Instagram is an amazing channel for reaching people, and it was always a fun challenge to work with our brilliant designer to come up with posts that used visual and verbal storytelling effectively.
Tools & resources
Part of my role at Common Seas involved working with the organisation’s in house experts to develop tools and resources to share their learning and experience more widely.
This work involved thinking through the steps involved in each project, and figuring out how to communicate this to the intended audience in a way that gave them both the necessary information and the confidence to act.
The resources pictured here are from Clean Blue Paros – a project to tackle tourist-related plastic waste on the island of Paros in Greece. All the resources are still live and available at https://commonseas.com/el/clean-blue-promise
Speeches and presentations
One of my favourite tasks at Common Seas was supporting the Founder Jo with all the speeches and presentations she gave on behalf of the organisation.
Here, Jo is speaking at the Plastic Health Summit about how the massive growth in plastic production presents a growing threat to human health.
Other work at Common Seas
Pitch decks
I storyboarded and wrote a lot of these in my time at Common Seas. For obvious reasons, I can’t show them here!
Campaigns
The main campaign I worked on while at Common Seas was Blood Type Plastic, but we also ran shorter, less high-profile campaigns to raise awareness of key issues.
Leaflets
I worked with on-the-ground teams in Indonesia and Greece to produce information leaflets to support behaviour change.
Blogging
I supported team members to write many blog posts in time at Common Seas, and occassionally had time to author my own!
