No one cared about the issue.
No one cared about the issue. We made it impossible to ignore.
We made it impossible to ignore.
For over two years, Clarity Creative’s founder, Kate, worked as a strategic consultant on communications campaigns for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, turning complex global health issues into stories that moved media, policymakers, and the public.
The spotlight project ended with a Guinness World Record (yes, really).
in 24 hours (World Record)
governments and donors
endemic and donor countries
1.7 billion people affected. Almost no one in the West knew what NTDs were.
Neglected tropical diseases affect nearly a quarter of the world's population, causing blindness, disfigurement, disability, and death across the Global South. A landmark public-private partnership backed by the Gates Foundation had been making extraordinary progress in eliminating them.
Almost nobody outside the global health community was paying attention. The diseases were unfamiliar, hard to pronounce, and easy to ignore. Media coverage was sparse. Public engagement was near zero. The partnership needed political will, corporate commitments, and public pressure to stay on track.
Working alongside Global Health Strategies, the Gates Foundation's advocacy and communications partner, Kate led the digital media strategy, creative content strategy, and M&E oversight for a months-long campaign building toward a global NTD Summit in April 2017. The brief: make the world care about something it had never heard of.
When nobody cares about your issue, you don’t communicate louder.
You communicate differently.
Picture this: The standard playbook for global health advocacy wasn’t going to work here. NTDs weren’t a crisis with dramatic footage. There was no celebrity diagnosis, no viral moment, no built-in news hook.
The diseases affected 1.7 billion people, but the names alone (lymphatic filariasis, schistosomiasis, trachoma) were enough to make most editors’ eyes glaze over. Kate’s team needed a strategy that didn’t just inform people. It needed to make them care about something they couldn’t pronounce, had never seen, and had no personal connection to. That required a fundamentally different approach.
The strategy worked on three levels simultaneously:
The campaigns, content & strategies.
The campaigns, content & strategies
The NTD Summit was the headline project. But it wasn’t the only time the Gates Foundation and other multinational clients trusted Kate with a complex communications challenge.
Over two years, she was brought back again and again across different issues, each with the same core problem: important work that the public couldn’t see, didn’t understand, or had never heard of.
Here’s what that looked like in practice
The results.
The results.
An issue nobody covered became
an issue nobody could ignore.
10 pharmaceutical companies. Global leaders. One coordinated voice.
Watch The Gates Foundation recap.
Four years of compounding strategy. Here’s the story the numbers told by the end.
Your issue is complex.
That's exactly what we solve.
Complex issues don't need more explanation. They need better stories, smarter distribution, and moments people can't look away from.