Gates Foundation — health advocacy content system
Public health messaging competes with everything else on a feed, and loses when it sounds like a press release. The work: make foundation-grade health information travel at the speed of social — accurate enough to defend, light enough to share.
The account began as a pitch. I designed the communications concepts that won it, then carried that thinking into the digital execution once the business was live.
The brief
The audience is reached mostly by phone, often on WhatsApp, usually in short bursts of attention. That is not a smaller version of a desktop audience — it is a different design problem, with different constraints at the point of delivery.
Health content also carries a burden other categories don't: it has to be right. A claim that overstates is worse than one that underwhelms, because the cost of being wrong is paid by the reader. So the system had to be fast to produce and difficult to get wrong.
Targets
Followers 1,500 organic Views 60,000 total Engagement 5% or higher
Set at the outset, and used to shape format and cadence decisions rather than to grade them afterwards. A 5% engagement floor rules out a lot of otherwise attractive layouts — anything that reads as an announcement rather than an answer.
Educational carousels and myth-busting graphics
Built from a mixture of the Gates Foundation brand guidelines and the brand colour palette.
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Winning the brief
Pitch work and production work pull in opposite directions. A pitch has to show range; production has to survive repetition. The concepts that won this account were built to do both — not a set of beautiful one-offs, but a demonstration that the idea could hold across months of output without going stale or drifting off-brand.
That decision paid off after the win, when the same system had to produce week after week.