Stepping back into my role as a senior campaigns strategist for Greenpeace International as we prepare to restructure...

After nearly 7 years working in campaigns at Greenpeace, I'm returning to the world of engagement, mobilisation, comms and fundraising for this new and exciting challenge. It's a fixed term role in the international SMT, but with a lot of changes underway, it's the right time for us to be improving how we collaborate so we can continue to press for positive environmental action (while also robustly challenging the bad!)I still find myself in awe at one colleague or another, almost every day, which is why I love working at Greenpeace. Thankfully, in such an environment, I still learn something new every day as well, which is exhilarating

Between the joint challenges of the pandemic and many pressing campaign objectives, I took on the role of Deputy Global Campaign Leader for our biodiversity work at Greenpeace International, and stepped up to be the Global Campaign Leader shortly after.

Having won the campaign to protect the Great Australian Bight from BP's oil exploration plans, I moved into another role with Greenpeace and left Australia for the UK. As a Senior Campaign Strategist (aka Senior Portfolio Manager) I am responsible for shaping Greenpeace's international campaigns work. This includes developing and writing proposals with national office staff, helping take those projects through the global approvals process, and then supporting the projects once they're live. We divide our work by topics and functions, so I am responsible for our Antarctic project (sign up here: http://act.gp/2Ak1Eqe), which sits in a broader ocean sanctuaries programme I manage, as well as our work relating to whales. I also represent and am responsible for international oceans work relating to digital, mobilisation, communications and public engagement work.

I joined Greenpeace with a mandate to 'supercharge' their oceans campaigning internationally, and moved to Sydney for the role. As the Ocean Lovers Project Lead (my original title) I carried out extensive consultation on the current state of Greenpeace's oceans campaigning, and created a strategy to greatly increase its effectiveness. In the first year that included delivering a linguistic research project, in order to shift the language being used in campaigns and communication products. I also led a social media project to increase people's sense of connection with the oceans, which garnered over 10k user-generated contributions. To embed the change, I created an overarching style guide that gives strategic direction to oceans campaigners internationally, in and out of Greenpeace.After a few months, I was also asked to lead an international campaign to prevent a major oil company from starting oil exploration in the Great Australian Bight (hence my job title change to Special Projects Lead). All of Greenpeace's work is approached through a lens of trying to reduce the severity of climate change, and my project trying to keep oil in the ground was no different. After only two months of planning and campaigning, we won and the team is now looking to create longer term protection for the Bight, while also trying to diminish the power of the fossil fuel industry over the Australian government.With Greenpeace, I also tried to bring the women's rights and majority world approaches that I developed while at ActionAid. In order to do that, I helped start a Diversity and Inclusion group in my base national office, and was part of an international 'Deep Dive group' that helped shape the new ten year strategy worldwide. I was also active in training colleagues on this analytical approach, as well as being actively involved as a trainer with their community of project managers. To 'show' the thinking, I organised collaborations with rights groups on refugee issues.

I joined the Restless Development Board of Trustees in 2018 to provide specialist knowledge of movements, organising and external engagement more broadly.

I was the International Head of Campaigns & Mobilisation for ActionAid International, managing our 3 multi-country Campaign Managers and our Engagement / Mobilisation Manager. My role was key to ensuring consistent strategic direction for our internationally coordinated campaigning in 45 countries, from the grassroots level in the poor communities they work with, to engaging urban dwellers globally in solidarity with their core campaigns work, in order to influence decision makers in the corporate and political world. Within this role, I also managed our network of youth activists, Activista, currently active in 25 countries from Bangladesh to Brazil and expanding. Through our campaigning and mobilisation work, I led a lot of the innovation within ActionAid, from introducing grassroots campaigning techniques tested within the original Obama election campaign to our land campaigning with local mayors in Mozambique, through to introducing the organisation to ICT4D (Information Communication Technology for Development) and other forms of technology to make our work more effective.My approach is consistent with one of my contributions to our international organisation strategy, 'to amplify the voices of the people we work with' and in 2014, I led the process to define our Campaign Signature to give us a consistent approach to campaigning, and achieve more impact. I also wrote the organisation's international Mobilisation and Supporter Growth Strategy based on extensive internal and external consultation.

As Global Engagement Manager (renamed Supporter Mobilisation Manager in 2014) for ActionAid International, I am responsible for improving ActionAid's campaign communications, managing our Activista youth campaigners network, and developing our digital campaigning work internationally. My role has been to lead a more innovative and externally aware approach to our work, and we have developed a lot of work pushing the boundaries of what has been done in the development sector. We have created multi-country campaigns that have united supporters and activists around campaigns - using accessible alternatives to being reliant on people having internet access, but still exploiting the massive reach of social media, such as #taxpaysfor, #safecitiesbecause and #landfor.My main responsibility is to increase the number of ActionAid supporters (financial and non-financial) to in excess of 5 million by the end of 2017, and have worked cross-functionally to achieve this, and put in place the necessary tools to measure this success. I work closely with our national colleagues and active grassroots supporters to ensure we increase our collective ability to challenge power.

I am responsible for ensuring the quality of all digital work at ActionAid, from using ICT as part of our development work (ICT4D), through to encouraging a coherent web presence for all the countries ActionAid works in.While at ActionAid International I have built very strong relationships with our global federation, and I work closely with teams across our network to improve the organisation’s presence online and build its digital impact.I rebuilt the main ActionAid International website and launched with 17 countries' national sites at the same time in a 'big bang launch' in May 2011. Since launch the site has gone from strength to strength more than doubling our regular visitors, and greatly increasing our visibility in search engines, thanks to our SEO work.One of the greatest strengths of how I conceived www.actionaid.org is that it allows for content to be shared instantly between countries, such as India and Afghanistan. When we have quality content, we are now able to disseminate it to a much larger audience.As well as delivering ongoing content and social media work, I produced some highly consultative digital strategy work. I am focused on capacity building to develop how ActionAid presents itself digitally, and am ensuring we build a strong global network of mutually supporting communications staff. I am also recruiting for an International Web Editor to ensure we're producing high quality content at all times.I have been working closely with teams worldwide training them to be effective social media communicators and campaigners.My proposals for development of the organisation's digital approach have now been approved by our board, and I am planning how to make the organisation a genuinely 'social organisation' with digital capacity and thinking spread throughout the organisation.

I designed, built and maintain the London Mining Network's website. I have also been working with them to improve their reach given very limited resources.To ensure their site was easy to update, I used Wordpress as their CMS. They have no technical staff, but I have trained their campaigners to be able to complete almost all significant tasks online, including automated tweeting.

I delivered the complete web strategy for the Ask The Climate Question campaign. The aim was to get people asking their PPCs (Prospective Parliamentary Candidate) what their policies will be on climate change as a top priority.I worked with Torchbox and Advocacy Online to deliver the website which has two interesting features from a web perspective: a map of every Climate Question Time, and an email your PPCs function.

I was an Associate Lecturer at the London College of Communications, teaching an MA unit in New Media & Technology for Marketing & Communications. The post was fixed term, and helped me gain valuable experience of the academic side of digital communications work.Teaching the class of (approx) 30 was an extremely productive method of gaining outside perspectives on approaches rarely challenged by practitioner's. It was really gratifying to work through the logic of best practice with students fresh to the subject, especially to be able to demonstrate with examples from my own career.Applying academic analysis to my practical skills is now proving very useful across a number of roles (employed and voluntary).

I looked after everything digital for the Stop Climate Chaos coalition, from the build, design and development of the website, to all our email comms and social media.The website I built (with consultation from Homemade Digital) imports updates, events and actions from across our diverse coalition of over 100 organisations. We have also run effective email to target campaigns that helped bring about the Climate Change Act and build support for climate action at COP15.Also for Stop Climate Chaos I created viral social aggregating content where people uploaded video of themselves doing a wave, to encourage more people to come to The Wave march in 2009. I worked with UNICEF to produce their Blue Hands digital project, also in support of The Wave. As part of encouraging people to go to The Wave, I also built a tool that helped people coordinate lifts, buses and transport to get to the event from all over the country. Estimates put attendance at The Wave at around 60,000 - 80,000 people, which made it the largest climate change march to date.

I worked with the democratically elected leader of West Papua who is currently in exile in the UK to help build their online presence, awareness of the campaign, and to create technical solutions to campaigning with supporters across the world with limited web access.

As a Web Designer for Blackwell Publishing I was responsible for designing and supporting the Polity’s website and many other professional societies’ websites. I also provide helpdesk support for all Blackwell's journal-based sites on a rota basis.As well as the XHTML and CSS coding, a large part of the role is managing the projects and clients, and delivering packages of work on schedule, and planning future work. Coding (ASP) is outsourced and I am responsible for negotiating with external contractors for development. While working here I have taught myself (and shared with the team) about many new technologies including semantic web technologies like microformatting.

I represented the One World Foundation, Nepal in the UK to potential funders and performed outreach functions on their behalf. I organised a speaker tour for two of the Nepali founders in 2006 which was very successful, and created their web presence.

In my spare time I used to write for the international ethical youth magazine Bulb, conducting interviews, reviewing new media, and representing the magazine at events around the UK.

As project manager of a hardware installation in London, I successfully delivered the installation of over 300 new desktops, within schedule and budget, for a demanding multinational financial institution in the city. As well as managing the overall project, I took the role of support engineer troubleshooting user’s problems on the helpdesk and providing desk side support. Prior to this position I was software testing for a large banking database project. Other experience with Unisys includes spending 3 years on a programme where I supported over 50 projects with responsibilities including network administration, planning, financials, change management and resourcing, for which I had a small team and worked closely with senior management and other team leaders. During my time at Unisys I gained experience of every aspect of the project lifecycle for software and hardware projects, and managed many elements of client engagement.