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 both define it, build the systems and team to support it and then enact it, all in a very short amount of time.

Solution: 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.

• 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.

• 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 celebrates 15 years of its partnership. Through the year, we’ll release 15 stories that reflect the influence, advocacy and impact of SWA’s work. The first one launched in April. You can see the others here.