Influence, Advocacy and Communications with UNICEF

Problem: Even before the significant shifts in international development aid that came with 2025, Sanitation and Water For All (SWA), a UNICEF-hosted partnership, understood the need to connect communications strategy to influence and advocacy work. As the first to take on this new communications role, I needed to define it, build the systems and team to support it and then enact it, all in a very short amount of time. In addition, an upcoming high-level meeting, co-hosted alongside the Government of Spain, would bring together Ministers from around the globe and would need its own strategy, supported by the organizational one.

Solutions:

Organizational approach

SWA needed shared language for policy, climate and government influence work. They also needed to be able to speak, succinctly and humanly, about who they are and what they do.

• I developed a series of Foundational Documents that could speak to a variety audiences that both explained the work and connected it to on-the-ground, changed-lives. See an example here.

• We launched new digital newsletters on LinkedIn (see second issue here) and within MailChimp to further connection and engagement with SWA opportunities, ideas and work. We also worked to improve the brand experience of SWA-hosted webinars, establishing SOPs and collaborative teams. Our first webinar for 2025 enjoyed a record number of attendees. See the report here.

• In 2025, SWA celebrated 15 years of its partnership. We released a series of designed stories that reflect the influence, advocacy and impact of SWA’s work in a compelling-to-read way. You can see them here.

• One SWA partnership collaboration, the Heads of State Initiatives, support presidents and prime ministers worldwide to make water, sanitation, and hygiene a priority of their mandate. Core partners of these efforts include UNICEF, WaterAid, IRC Wash, the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the Government of the UK. I developed the comprehensive communications strategy and workplan to complement the global strategy.

  Event & Communications Strategy: The Sector Ministers’ Meeting in Madrid, Spain
  High-level meetings, a core product of SWA since its beginning, have been the only regular, minister-focused global convenings dedicated to water and sanitation. These gatherings bring together ministers responsible for water, sanitation, and hygiene along with their counterparts responsible for climate, environment, health, and the economy. The meetings create a space for world leaders to discuss strategies, identify solutions, and explore innovative ways to elevate the political prioritization of water, sanitation, and hygiene.

• We developed event branding and attendee resources like the website and Trello toolkit. Using Squarespace, we built the website to be flexible enough to use ahead of, during and after the event.

• Organizational content strategy ahead of the event involved unpacking the meeting’s theme—breaking silos—across various articles posted on LinkedIn, the monthly SWA newsletter and the SWA website.

• Design and messaging around the meeting’s main output: The High-Level Leaders Compact on Water Security and Resilience. The video we developed was shown both at the meeting and later, at COP 30.

• We created a partner and donor-facing report with an eye to the impacts of the meeting and the work of 2026.

• Creative partners:

  • We developed relationships with local designers, photographers and videographers to design the event visuals and capture the event. You can see some examples in the event photos from Day 1 & Day 2.

  • We also worked with media teams based Madrid, Latin America and Africa to carry country-specific messages into the regions where we’re building relationships. Brazil was an important connection point for us given the COP30 events immediately after this one and we worked hard to tie the outcomes of this Madrid meeting. Some highlights included CEO interviews with El Pais (Spain), El Economista (Mexico), Xataka (Brazil).