WHAT I DO
MAJOR PROJECTS
BBC INNOVATORS
Head-hunted to be the digital lead for several major BBC World Service special partnership projects with external organisations. BBC Innovators was a two-year multi-platform, multi-language project focusing on solutions journalism stories emerging from Africa and Asia. Not only was I responsible for social media strategy, digital and audience engagement in one of the BBC’s most successful projects of this kind but I also jumped in and developed ideas and worked as an overseas field producer and radio presenter for the Africa season. We saw significant impact, drove global conversations and hit record levels of engagement across all platforms.
Photo Credit: BBC.com
Top-down: Refilwe Ledwaba, Founder of Girl Fly Programme in Africa Foundation (GFPA); Entrepreneur Oscar Ekponimo is tackling food waste in Nigeria with his app Chowberry; Woman and baby in Nepal where solar suitcases are being used to help tackle mortality rates.
BUSINESS BEASTS
The Business Beasts is my passion project. Embarking on a stint in the BBC’s Business Unit a few years ago, I started sketching and investigating the animals which appear in the world of business. One finding of a co-author and illustrator – Dominic Bailey – and then months of research, one video, one radio package and a lot of fun later, please take a look at an A-Z of Business Beasts. It’s been lauded by educators, economists, artists and business people.
FREEDOM 2014
I was head-hunted to be the digital lead for this pan BBC creative challenge project. We asked the world what freedom looked like – and the world delivered. A multi-language project, I was responsible for curating and filtering thousands of stories and guiding a global conversation on this topic. I was also behind the BBC’s commission of auteur Grant Morrison to create a wordless superhero comic especially for Freedom2014.
CHANGING THE RULES
I was the social and online lead for this BBC World Service project in partnership with The Skoll Foundation. This multi-language project focused on social enterprise and people causing positive disruption around the world. I devised and implemented a high impact engagement social strategy that led to people taking action in their own communities to follow the examples of those whose stories we featured. My creative strategies led to virality.
BBC TAKING THE TEMPERATURE
A BBC World Service series highlighting social entrepreneurs taking on the challenges of climate change. This is another partnership project with The Skoll Foundation. Focusing on attempts made to protect the planet, my role was to devise creative ways of sharing the stories across social media and to generate audience engagement. With at least one film reaching five million plus views on English Facebook alone, my social media strategies were deemed a success.