CASE STUDY: BRAND & COMMUNICATIONS

Common Seas

Common Seas is a social enterprise that’s tackling the plastic crisis.

I worked for Common Seas for five years, developing the brand and deploying it on the website, across social media and in presentations, speeches and campaigns.

Core messaging

The challenge with Common Seas was that there was always so much to say. The subject matter was often complex, and needed precise, evidence-based language.

We wanted to help employeses stay ‘on message’ while having the flexibility to communicate creatively with their target audiences.

I worked with team leads to create message houses – for Common Seas as a whole and for each project. These acted as an adaptable framework that anyone could use to support their communication.

They were used by myself and others to keep our outreach consistent and credible – whether we were talking about education with schoolteachers or diaper programmes with government representatives.

Instagram

Common Seas speaks to both an expert and mainstream citizen audience.

We wanted our theory of change and all our project work to cut through and make sense to as many people as possible.

Tools & resources

I worked with Common Seas’ in-house experts to develop tools and resources to share their learning and experience more widely.

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 & 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 created a lot of these in my time at Common Seas, usually pitching projects to funders. We had a great success rate!

Campaigns

The main campaign I worked on while at Common Seas was Blood Type Plastic. 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.