How to grab the world’s attention, one opinion piece at a time

When the Global Center on Adaptation (GCA) was founded in 2018, it faced two early challenges: no one knew who it was or what it stood for. Yet within 18 months, the organisation’s thought leadership op eds were being published in the world’s most influential titles, including the New York Times, CNN, Fortune, Financial Times and Washington Post.

How the GCA grabbed and sustained the world’s attention is a masterclass in how organisations can quickly build an international profile and shape public policy, while relying exclusively on earned media.

This exposure was significant in helping to significantly increase funding for the GCA and to persuade heads of state to attend more of its events. It also launched its chief executive Patrick Verkooijen as a leading commentator on climate adaptation – the need to protect our natural and built environments against the harmful impacts of climate change.

Alex Gee, a former journalist and GCA’s director of communications from 2018 to earlier this year, credits much of the organisation’s rapid increase in visibility to a carefully constructed editorial strategy executed with content agency FirstWord.

“I needed to get GCA’s message about the urgent need for climate adaptation in front of policy-makers. I knew the power of good writing, published in the right place, would gain their attention and therefore the action we – and the whole world – desperately needed,” she says.

Fighting for attention

Central to Gee’s challenge was that the world’s fight against climate change was focused on mitigating or reducing carbon emissions, rather than in preparing communities to live in a much warmer climate. This was affecting where global funds were allocated.

The GCA’s mission was to draw the world’s attention to the effects of climate change that were already being experienced – floods, droughts, wildfires, ever-more destructive hurricanes and typhoons – and to champion solutions for climate adaptation. It needed to widen the world’s focus and promote the idea that the two approaches – mitigation and adaptation – were complementary, while helping to raise awareness and funding for vital adaptation work.

Gee’s editorial strategy was centred on op eds: comment and thought leadership pieces published in Tier One media, with the GCA collaborating and co-authoring pieces with high-profile supporters, including heads of state.

Few parts of a publication carry more influence than the opinion pages. But slots are very hard to secure. The New York Times, for example, receives more than 1,000 unsolicited submissions a week and publishes only a handful a day. Only the best thinking and writing make it through. This meant working with people who had the skills to develop and write powerful pieces.

Be topical

“To cut through and be successful, a piece has got to be linked to the current news agenda, have an original viewpoint – something slightly counterintuitive is useful – have clear takeaways and be well written,” she says. “It also helps if you can deliver all that through a voice that is already well-known and respected.”

Working to this agenda, Gee framed the GCA’s message in economic rather than environmental terms. This centred on the benefits of investing in climate adaptation – planting drought-resistant crops, for example, or strengthening urban infrastructure – and why it made more economic sense than throwing money at disaster recovery.

Gee became adept at turning each new climate crisis into an opportunity to champion climate adaptation. She publicised the plight of low-lying islands facing imminent extinction from rising sea levels; trained a spotlight on how Miami was financing stronger flood defences with municipal bonds; and got editors interested in how Bangladesh evacuated millions of people before a super-cyclone during Covid-19 thanks to big investments in disaster preparedness. As each opportunity to publish an op ed arose, she chose the most relevant GCA high-level contact to be a co-author.

Choose your partners carefully

The GCA was a young organisation, but it was very well-connected. Its founding chair is former Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon, and it was well supported by many heads of state, particularly in countries where climate change was already having a devastating impact. Working with Verkooijen, they persuaded Ban to be the lead author on a double-hander for the GCA’s first op ed – for the Boston Globe – in March 2019, on how to climate-proof communities.

But Ban and Verkooijen were busy men, which is where FirstWord stepped in to help.

Among its large stable of accomplished journalists is Leslie Crawford, former deputy opinion editor at the Financial Times. She had spent years rejecting op ed submissions and honing only the very best into pieces good enough to publish. Crawford quickly became the go-to ghost for Gee, and her input was supplemented by other experienced writers and editors.

“We had FirstWord holding our hand right from the start and they were invaluable for developing our ideas into pieces that could capture opinion editors’ attention, as well as coming up with relevant new angles to keep our story going,” says Gee. This support might include fleshing out a GCA idea into a wider, more compelling piece, or suggesting ways to make it more time-sensitive and therefore more likely to be picked up by an editor.

Gee and FirstWord quickly developed a modus operandi that linked GCA’s key messages with current events in a thoughtful way, such as exploring how climate change can intensify existing conflict. Sharing experiences of what had and hadn’t worked around the world was also crucial to building a reputation for knowledge, effective campaigning and pragmatism.

“We were able to showcase our knowledge and ambition in well-argued, robust articles that were published in exactly the right media for our purposes,” she says, adding that presenting oven-ready articles, not just a synopsis, to publications, helped increase their appetite.

Make it easy for editors to say yes

“Opinion editors get so many ideas sent to them that you’ve got to stand out. When they receive a fully formed piece that has already been through FirstWord’s stringent newsroom process and seen by multiple pairs of eyes, the editors can know straight away it won’t require much additional work on their side. Quite quickly all my pitches were read, and I soon always got a response,” she says. And if a piece wasn’t accepted by her first choice, she always found a home for it elsewhere, “because the quality of the writing was so high”.

Besides being fully written, she thinks a steady drumbeat helps maintain interest from editors. For GCA, she puts that at an average of one piece every two months, which she admits “is quite a lot” but “we had a lot of urgent things to say”.

Go for a bonkers reaction

When asked to pick her favourite published piece she immediately cites The Climate Crisis in Terms Trump Can Understand, an op ed by Ban and Verkooijen published in November 2019 in the New York Times in the week that President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the Paris Climate Accord, on the eve of a big UN forum on sustainable development.

“It ended up on the front page and people were coming up to Patrick during the meetings saying they’d read it and loved it and that it had really helped frame the conversations they were having. It was bonkers,” she says.

Another favourite was a three-hander between President Macron of France, President Macky Sall of Senegal and Mark Rutter, at the time prime minister of the Netherlands, published in The Guardian ahead of COP 27 in 2022.

“We had highly visible people expressing in really strong terms that Africa needed help now because the climate was already collapsing, every year knocking 15 per cent off the continent’s growth potential. These and other pieces we worked on with FirstWord had the heft and timing to get the world’s attention,” she says.

Getting results

She credits the success of her op ed strategy as one of the forces behind a big increase in fundraising and raising the profile of GCA and its core message. “We saw a marked increase in the number of heads of state at our events after these sorts of pieces and fundraising increased,” she says. “These pieces made it a cause that people wanted to get on board with, they could see it had increasing momentum.”

Today, Gee thinks high-quality thought leadership is more valuable than ever, saying: “In a world of AI slop, quality thought leadership executed well by experienced journalists stands out and still gets the readers’ attention.”

If that’s something your organisation could use, get in touch. We’d love to help you find your audience, become a decisive and thoughtful voice in the debate and make you the go-to commentator on an important issue.