Author Archives: Liz Sharma

Global Resilience Partnership (GRP)

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The Challenge: The Global Resilience Partnership was seeking to raise understanding and visibility for the role of resilience in tackling global development issues over the long term. More specifically they wanted to leverage the work of their global network of 38 Challenge winners – from a series of competitions hosted by GRP to find innovative, scalable solutions – all working on different aspects of resilience across the Sahel and Horn of Africa and in Southeast Asia.

Our Approach: Marchmont delivered a comprehensive support package designed to make the complex, abstract concept of “resilience” come to life – in other words, to make it personal, tangible and urgent. This included an initial landscape analysis, which informed the communications planning. Marchmont created a detailed editorial calendar to identify opportunities for proactive media outreach on behalf of the Challenge winners. We also organised several media field visits of their work on the ground. Marchmont also ran communications workshops and strategic planning sessions to build capacity amongst Challenge winners so they could amplify their work in-house more effectively.

Outcomes: Marchmont secured a range of top-tier and specialist media coverage of GRP and its Challenge winners over a two-year period, including multiple articles from Reuters, The Telegraph, BBC, Voice of America, El Pais, Xinhua, Thomson Reuters Foundation, Devex, The Conversation, Quartz Africa, World Economic Forum, AllAfrica, CGTN Africa, USAID Climate Links, Inter Press Service, Zilient and Mongabay. Marchmont also managed the production of two documentary-style thematic videos on Challenge winners’ impact on the ground – one focusing on innovative financial products in rural Kenya and a second on flood resilient homes in Vietnam and Bangladesh – and helped promote an Investor Forum designed to attract additional funding to the Challenge winners.

We Mean Business

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The Challenge: The We Mean Business Coalition is a global non-profit coalition that works with some of the world’s most influential businesses to accelerate the actions needed to build a climate resilient net-zero economy.

The Coalition wanted to communicate its climate policy asks to governments ahead of the UN COP26 climate talks – one of the biggest climate policy events of the year, and also a highly competitive media environment.

Our Approach: To achieve these aims, Marchmont developed an evolving, multi-phased, flexible media plan. Firstly, to create early momentum ahead of COP26, Marchmont worked with We Mean Business to launch an open letter signed by 600+ companies across the world calling on the G20 to halve emissions by 2030. This initial outreach was then sustained through ongoing reactive pitching in the lead-up to COP26 itself.

Marchmont then capitalised on We Mean Business’ presence at COP26 to reinforce these messages and secure media opportunities for their spokespeople, including from the Coalition as well as CEOs of their partner companies. This outreach included providing reaction to the progress of negotiations, as well as a series of thought leadership pieces before, during, and after COP26.

Finally, we used the announcement of a new Chairman of the Coalition in the New Year as an opportunity to pitch “year ahead”-style briefings designed to consolidate their visibility and profile into the new year.

Outcomes: Media outreach resulted in:

  • Widespread coverage of the G20 open letter, including coverage in mainstream outlets such as The Guardian and The National, as well as coverage in specialist, sustainability-focused outlets such as BusinessGreen and ESG Today.
  • Around the COP26 climate talks, Marchmont helped secure a range of opportunities in top-tier outlets, including Reuters, CNBC and the Wall Street Journal, as well as specialist titles such as Edie.
  • Additional media coverage was also secured through the placement of a series of opinion pieces, including in Reuters, Euronews, and Euractiv.
  • Marchmont also secured top-tier coverage around the announcement of a new chairman of the Coalition in 2022, including write-ups in the Financial Times, and The Times, and broadcast interviews on BBC Radio 4 and Times Radio.

nextProtein

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The Challenge: When French-Tunisian start-up nextProtein successfully secured their series A funding, they wanted to use it as an opportunity to highlight the growth potential and sustainability of their insect-based protein to a broader international audience.

Our Approach: Marchmont worked with nextProtein to identify angles that would help elevate the pitch beyond the investment announcement and position the company both around its cutting-edge technology and its corporate ethos. This also included identifying opportunities to frame the announcement in the wider context of the EU’s Farm to Fork policy.

Outcomes: The media outreach resulted in widespread coverage both in top-tier and specialist/trade media, in both English and French, which was further amplified  across social media. Highlights included coverage from Agence France Presse (AFP), Quartz Africa, Crunchbase, Les Echos, and AgFunderNews.

Inclusive Business Action Network (iBAN)

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The Challenge: The Inclusive Business Action Network (iBAN) wanted to raise wider visibility for, and drive traffic to, its new online platform and bi-monthly magazine ‘CLUED-iN’. This included targeting entrepreneurs, social enterprise leaders and other key stakeholders engaged in inclusive business development.

Our Approach: Marchmont provides ongoing outreach support via both traditional media and social media. For the former, this includes distributing media alerts and drafting and placing opinion pieces with relevant specialist media outlets. For the latter, it includes creating e-bulletins, social media toolkits and graphics cards for social media dissemination, both via iBAN and the magazine’s contributors as well as iBAN’s wider networks. During the launch period, Marchmont also manages iBAN’s Twitter and LinkedIn accounts.

Outcomes: Each round of Marchmont’s social media activity helps iBAN reach an average of 341K users on Twitter, and has led to a 50 per cent increase in iBAN profile visits and more than tripling its number of new followers. Marchmont has also secured coverage around iBAN’s online platform launches from Next Billion, DevDiscourse, Business Green, Pioneers Post, Business Fights Poverty, International Agri-Food Network and Endeva.

International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT)

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The Challenge: Maize, beans and bananas are essential components of African diets and livelihoods, and are under extreme threat from climate change. A major study from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), published in Nature Climate Change, provided for the first time a timeline for action to preserve food security, detailing exactly when agricultural regions across Africa will need to transform. CIAT approached Marchmont to deliver a communications campaign to amplify the key messages of the report and offer practical advice to policymakers and donors on how to take action.

Our Approach: Marchmont first distilled the key messages of the study into a two-page media summary and press release. We positioned the story against the backdrop of the El-Niño induced drought that was affecting large areas in Southern and Eastern Africa at the time, asking journalists: Is El Niño the tip of the iceberg for African farmers? In addition, Marchmont created a series of animated GIFs for sharing on social media, which extracted the key takeaways from the study in a visually engaging way.

Outcomes: Our media campaign generated 71 pieces of coverage, including The Guardian, BBC, Reuters and Agence France Presse. Three opinion pieces were placed in the media (Reuters, Financial Times and the AllAfrica newswire) focussing on different aspects of the study. Environmental thought leader Al Gore even shared a piece we placed in National Geographic on Twitter, calling the research “eye-opening”.

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