Campaigns
I help people, teams and organizations to have transformational impact.
Integrated Strategy and Strategic Communications
I can draft, collaborate with you on, facilitate, critique or turbocharge your campaigning, communications and integrated fundraising strategies.
Mobilization and Organizing
I will help you maximise your influence alongside rights-holders blending grassroots and cutting-edge digital campaigning techniques with policy insights.
Storytelling and Messaging
I can craft compelling narratives, stories and copy for you, amplifying and centering the voices of rights holders and winning high profile media attention.
Testimonials
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Hugh is a gifted and talented leader with key strengths in digital campaigning and project management. He has a sharp strategic mind with clear focus on detail balanced with always staying true to the bigger picture. He is an absolute joy to work with and his dedication, passion and cross-cultural people skills are an asset to any leadership role or organisation he chooses to be part of. It was a privilege to be his line manager and colleague.
Rathana Chea, CEO, Multicultural Leadership Initiative
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I had the pleasure of working with Hugh on Oxfam's Behind the Brands campaign where he served as the team's digital strategist. Hugh is an expert in his field, he is on top of trends in a fast moving space, and is effective at implementing his plans. He is a team player, and always displays respect while also maintaining good humor in high pressure situations.
Irit Tamir, Senior Director, Private Sector Department, Oxfam America
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I worked with Hugh while building a global climate justice campaign. I was struck by Hugh’s drive for results - he was thorough in ensuring complicated issues were resolved with good humour and in good time. He excels in building partnerships and relationships across diverse movements and is a natural leader in strategic communications and campaigning.
Serena Maher, Head of Campaigns and Communications, ActionAid International
Past work
Strategic Communications: Age discrimination ban, 2007-9
I led the flagship Help the Aged campaign that secured a UK ban on age discrimination. I repackaged a government consultation on equalities for supporters and analysed responses for a submission to government. I developed and delivered a petitioning tour around the country targeting key cabinet ministers and their shadow equivalents, piloted SMS petitioning, and coached campaigners to lobby these MPs.
I also organized digital and above-the-line ad placement targeting MPs and Whitehall ISPs in the week of the cabinet decision. We were told by one cabinet minister that “Help the Aged made the difference in getting age protections into the Equality Bill.”
Integrated Campaign: Grassroots Crowdfunder, 2022
While working at ActionAid UK I co-created with policy and fundraising colleagues in Ghana and the UK, the development sector’s first direct crowdfunder to support a grassroots group in the Global South. We ensured that 100% of the profits up to the £9k target were donated directly to Network of Communities in Development (NOCID), a campaign group in Ghana. We smashed the target, securing regular gifts from campaign supporters, reactivating lapsed donors and helping establish that campaign supporters had 3 times the lifetime value of other individual givers.
Mobilization and Organizing: Access to Justice: 2018-2023
On joining ActionAid UK I was given the job of building the organization’s next flagship campaign. I built links with Women’s March London and sponsored their 250,000 march in spite of Donald Trump in 2018.
Then I built a community organizing function that trained up a UK-wide network of self-organising feminist activists who even went on to train ActionAid staff in feminist leadership.
I also co-created bilateral campaigns with partners in Ghana and Jordan that secured government commitments to ban violence and harassment in the world of work, and worked with Trade Unions and factories to introduce new Codes of Conduct to clamp down on these behaviors.
By the end of the campaign we had mobilised more than 100,000 actions across multiple countries and doubled our campaigner base.
Mobilization and Organizing: Palm oil campaign, 2013-14
Greenpeace hired me as Digital Mobilisation Lead for Protect Paradise, a global palm oil campaign. I managed a team of four specialists across different countries, developed values-priority messaging, launched two microsites and mobilised hundreds of thousands of people through petitions, email actions, social media storms and campaign moments. We secured commitments from Procter & Gamble and several other global brands to stop sourcing palm oil through deforestation in Indonesia.
Storytelling and messaging: Bringing refugee voices to the UN, 2016
The UN World Humanitarian Summit in 2016 was meant to be an opportunity for humanitarian actors to commit to a more devolved and inclusive way of working. But the voices of those directly affected were not in the room.
I had the idea of setting up a series of mini humanitarian summits in refugee and IDP camps. I coached staff and volunteers in Western Sahara, Nyaragusu Camp in Tanzania, and the Lake Chad Basin to hold these summits.
We live streamed one via YouTube and live blogged two summits on Twitter (X), while we shared a petition that thousands of the public signed in support. Participants at each summit created a manifesto of demands. I organised for Winnie Byanyima, the Executive Director of Oxfam International, to read out these demands at the summit itself in plenary, reference the growing petition, and call on decision-makers to act.
Storytelling and Messaging - Emissions campaigning, 2012-13
Greenpeace hired me as a Digital Mobilisation lead to take forward their VW Darkside campaign, which went on to mobilise 500,000 actions to pressure VW to green its cars. We took the campaign to the Paris Motor Show and ran direct actions calling the company out.
Once VW committed to green its cars, I wound down VW Darkside and created a new campaign identity and story as we pivoted our campaign to focus on getting the EU to pass emissions reduction legislation.
For this I launched EU vs CO2, a campaign with a graphic novel-inspired aesthetic and gamification mechanism. We mobilised tens of thousands of people across the UK and Europe to pressure their MEP to back this legislation.
Storytelling: Ebola campaign, 2014
I was brought in to lead Oxfam’s digital campaign to drive petition and fundraising engagement on ebola. One of the challenges at the time was gathering audiovisual content from countries affected as ebola spread quickly among communities.
I came up with the idea of producing a powerful video using just the audio from affected communities, to emphasise the isolation and gravity of the situation for so many people in West Africa. We mobilised the bulk of the 100,000+ people taking action on this issue at the time.
Let’s work together.
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