Work that needed clear thinking and the right next move
Every project has its own moving parts.
The below examples show how I help organisations make sense of complexity, choose a practical way forward and turn good thinking into useful action.
Sector: End of life care | Service: Campaign design and delivery
The Elephant in the Room
Everyone deserves the end of life care they actually want, but getting people to register meant starting a conversation that most families would rather avoid. Harder, often, for the friends and family than for the patient themselves.
I designed and delivered the public awareness campaign from scratch. 'The Elephant in the Room' was built around the idea that death is the one thing we all need to talk about but nobody wants to bring up.
The campaign spanned traditional advertising, a dedicated website, and a full social media strategy, all managed within budget. I also commissioned and produced an animation designed to deliver difficult messaging with warmth and sensitivity. It was built with white-label properties so that other end of life care providers could use it too.
Within 9 months, registrations increased by 25%.
Sector: Housing | Service: Customer engagement and communications
Turning a leaflet into something worth reading
Almond Housing Association sent a quarterly leaflet to its tenants. Four pages of A4 that didn't really tell anyone anything. A previous attempt to go digital, a PDF version, hadn't landed either. Many of the association's tenants were older, and a screen-first approach simply didn't suit the audience.
I scrapped the leaflet and replaced it with a proper magazine. A bi-annual publication, 16 pages for the winter issue, 28 for the summer, packed with stories from the housing association and the wider local community. It had personality. It had a wordsearch. It felt like something you'd actually pick up and read.
But I also knew that printing and posting a magazine to around 2,500 homes costs money, and I wanted tenants to have a say in whether it was worth it. After the summer issue landed, I ran a tenant survey and was completely transparent about the costs, sharing the actual figures so people could make an informed judgement.
The survey received a 15% response rate, well above the industry average of 9%. The verdict was mixed, as you'd expect when you ask people honestly, but the majority were still in favour of the printed and posted model.
Sector: Healthcare | Service: Internal communications and digital implementation
Connecting 850 people who'd never been connected
Anglian Community Enterprise had 850 staff spread across multiple locations and a classic internal comms problem. HQ and back-office teams were kept in the loop. Frontline healthcare workers were not.
It wasn't just an engagement issue. It was becoming a reputational one. One of the organisation's services was attracting negative press coverage, and frontline staff were being asked about it by patients, families, and the public. They had nothing to say, because nobody had told them anything.
I'd seen Workplace (Facebook's business platform) implemented successfully at a previous organisation and knew it could work here. I built the business case, secured the budget, and led the rollout, working directly with the tech team at Workplace as system administrator, supported by one member of staff.
But technology alone doesn't change culture. People need a reason to log on. So we made it human. At Christmas, we got the senior management team out on a Santa run delivering mince pies and oranges to every office, followed live on Workplace. Suddenly, people who'd never had a window into the wider organisation were watching, commenting, and connecting.
Within a short timeframe, engagement was building across teams that had previously operated entirely in silos. For the first time, frontline workers had a direct line to the information, and the people, that mattered.
Sector: Start-up / Childcare | Service: Start-up support and marketing
Building something from scratch
In 2014, the government introduced childminder agencies for the first time. Until then, every childminder in the country had to register through Ofsted. There was no alternative.
Suffolk Childcare Agency (SCA) was one of the very first to enter this brand-new market. Ground-breaking, yes. But also completely uncharted territory. There was no playbook, no competitor to learn from, and a sector that didn't yet understand what an agency even was.
I worked alongside the founder to get the business off the ground, from shaping the brand with a designer, to mapping out and commissioning the website, to producing the policies and procedures that would underpin the operation.
As the business launched and started to grow, I provided ongoing business advice and support, and represented the agency at a major business conference.
Today, over a decade later, SCA is a national agency and still going strong.
Sector: Health and care | Service: Research, analysis and strategic reporting
The question nobody had pulled together before
Does the generation you were born into affect whether you stay in your job? That was the question posed by the health and care system in the North of England, initially focused on nursing retention.
But I challenged the scope. If this was a system-wide project, it should look system-wide. I made the case to extend the remit beyond nurses to include care workers and other roles across the health and care landscape, and got the green light.
What followed was months of deep, autonomous research. There was no single source of truth and no neat list of contacts. I had to dig, finding the right people across a sprawling system of organisations, building relationships from scratch, and piecing together local and national research that had never been brought together in one place before.
The result was a comprehensive report, consolidating existing research with new data analysis, presented directly to the Executive team. It gave the system a single, accessible evidence base on generational diversity and retention, something that simply hadn't existed before.