The Brief
SOA had built something rare: a global network of more than 6,000 young ocean leaders across 165 countries, organized through 72 hubs, and an accelerator that had already moved meaningful capital to founders solving marine problems. The work was real. The operations were already in place. The challenge was that the story of what SOA was actually doing — and how the capital flowing through it was producing measurable ocean outcomes — was getting lost behind ocean-conservation noise.
The brief, in plain terms: connect ocean startups with the funding they need by making the value of SOA's funding mechanism legible to investors, partners, multilateral bodies, and the youth leaders who keep the network alive. Not a rebrand. Not a campaign. A long-running operating system for how SOA tells its story across capital markets, conservation policy, and community.
The Strategy
SOA already passed the credibility test laid out in the pillar guide on purpose-driven marketing — the operations existed before the marketing. My job wasn't to invent purpose; it was to build the surface area that let the existing purpose travel further. The strategy mapped to four of the five framework pillars from that guide, with the investor-attractiveness lens I later articulated in Forbes running through the whole engagement.
Specificity over scale
SOA could have positioned as "we're saving the ocean." Instead, we anchored the story in five named impact areas — CO2 reduction and blue carbon, pollution reduction and circular economy, ecosystem preservation and restoration, plus two more — each tied to specific solution counts and outcomes. The 222 Solutions framing turned an abstract mission into a verifiable inventory.
Long-term partnerships, not one-off campaigns
The Ocean Pitch Challenge ran in partnership with RESPECTOCEAN and was anchored to the UN Decade of Ocean Science 2021–2030. The IUCN 2021 advocacy on seabed mining (Motions 069 and 003) was co-led with The Oxygen Project. None of this was campaign-length thinking. We picked a small number of partners and committed to multi-year cadences with each one.
Document from the field
The most powerful proof points didn't come from agency conference rooms. They came from the founders inside the Accelerator, the youth leaders running hubs in 165 countries, and the policy moments where SOA's network showed up in person — IUCN, the UN Ocean Conference, regional summits. Every campaign asset built on first-hand documentation, not stock language about the blue economy.
Report honestly, including the limits
SOA's own facts-and-figures sheet led with what had been done, not what had been promised. $900K in direct SOA investment unlocked $228M in follow-on capital across 45 companies — that's a 250x leverage multiple, and it's the number that gets investors to lean in. We never inflated it, never rounded it, and always paired it with the operational metrics behind it.
The investor-attractiveness lens
This engagement is the case study I had in mind when I later wrote in Forbes that the businesses defining the next wave of innovation will be the ones that build purpose into their DNA, measure it credibly, and stay adaptable as capital priorities shift. SOA didn't have to retrofit any of that. The work was making sure their story was told in the language that impact investors, multilateral funders, and corporate partners actually use.
The brands that attract customers and the businesses that attract capital increasingly look like the same companies. SOA was already living that — the work was making sure the world could see it.
Execution in the Field
Across the engagement, the work fell into three workstreams that ran in parallel: a strategy layer (business strategy, brand positioning, founder advisory, stakeholder engagement), a creative-planning layer (big-idea generation, UX, content planning, GTM, social, press), and a storytelling and execution layer (content overhauls, copywriting, graphic design, campaign development).
Ocean Pitch Challenge
The Ocean Pitch Challenge is SOA's flagship investment-readiness competition for ocean founders. We rebuilt the way the challenge was packaged — for entrants, judges, and the partners co-funding the prize pool. By the 2024 cycle, the challenge was operating in partnership with RESPECTOCEAN and aligned to the UN Decade of Ocean Science, with winners visible to a much wider field of impact investors than before.
The 222 Solutions campaign
The biggest single piece of storytelling work was turning SOA's verified solution database into a public-facing artifact. "222 Solutions for Ocean Restoration" gave the network something concrete to point to: not "we support solutions" in the abstract, but a counted, categorized inventory across the five impact areas. It became the centerpiece of fundraising decks, partnership conversations, and press outreach.
Seabed Mining & The Youth Agenda at IUCN 2021
The IUCN 2021 World Conservation Congress was the highest-leverage policy moment of the engagement. Working alongside Alanna Smith and Vasser Seydel of The Oxygen Project, SOA pushed Motions 069 and 003 on the seabed mining moratorium into the formal youth agenda. The communications work — discussion programming, social mobilization, post-event documentation — was what allowed a youth-led network to punch well above its weight in a forum traditionally dominated by states and large NGOs.
The Ocean Leadership Program
The Ocean Leadership Program (OLP) is the network layer beneath everything else: 6,000+ youth leaders, 72 hubs, 22,740 events in 165 countries. The storytelling work here wasn't about producing campaigns — it was about giving local hub leaders the assets, language, and brand consistency to tell SOA's story in their own voices, in their own contexts. Decentralized storytelling that still feels like one organization is one of the hardest design problems in nonprofit communications. We built for it deliberately.
Outcomes
The headline numbers across the engagement period:
Capital mobilized
$228M in total investment moved into 45 ocean companies in the Accelerator portfolio, against $900K in direct SOA investment — a roughly 250x capital leverage ratio.
Network reach
6,000+ active youth ocean leaders across 72 hubs in 165 countries, running 22,740 documented events across the engagement period.
Jobs created
498 jobs created through the Ocean Leadership Program, with 98 specifically classed as ocean-economy roles within the Accelerator portfolio.
Verified ocean impact
Across the named impact areas: 15,640 metric tons of CO₂ reduced, avoided, or sequestered (14 solutions); 1,755 metric tons of solid waste removed, upcycled, or avoided (62 solutions); 89,228 m² of blue-carbon ecosystems protected or restored (39 solutions).
Policy outcomes
Youth-led mobilization at IUCN 2021 helped surface seabed-mining motions (069 and 003) into the formal youth agenda — contributing to the broader pressure that has since seen multiple states call for a precautionary pause on deep-sea mining.
The number I keep coming back to is the leverage ratio. $900K of organizational investment unlocking $228M of follow-on capital is the kind of multiple that lets an impact organization make the case to its own funders — and it's only possible when the operations, the measurement, and the narrative are all aligned.
What I'd Do Differently
Three things, looking back.
Build the impact-measurement layer earlier. The named-numbers framing — 14 solutions producing this much CO₂, 62 producing this much waste reduction — is what made the case studies and decks land with funders. We arrived at that level of specificity midway through. If I started again, I'd build that measurement infrastructure in the first 90 days and let everything else hang from it.
Invest more in founder narrative coaching, not just network communications. The 45 founders inside the Accelerator are individually the strongest proof of SOA's thesis. Some of them landed their pitches beautifully; others left capital on the table because the narrative wasn't quite ready. A more deliberate founder-storytelling track inside the Accelerator would have lifted the whole portfolio.
Plan policy moments earlier in the cycle. The IUCN 2021 work was successful, but the runway was tighter than it needed to be. Policy windows — IUCN, UN Ocean Conference, COP — close on hard deadlines, and the storytelling work to be ready for them needs at least a year of lead time, ideally two. I treat that as table stakes now; I didn't always.
Andi: please replace these three with whatever you'd actually say — these are draft points based on what's visible in the materials and the shape of the engagement, but the most credible version is your own reflection.
The Takeaway for Other Organizations
If you're running an impact organization, a foundation, or a purpose-led startup and trying to figure out how to translate genuine work into capital-attracting narrative, the SOA engagement points to a few transferable lessons:
- Inventory before story. "We support ocean startups" is forgettable. "222 verified solutions across five impact areas, with these specific outcomes" is investable. Count things. Categorize them. Publish the count.
- Show the leverage ratio. Investors and funders don't care about gross spend; they care about what your dollar moves. Find your version of the 250x ratio and make it the headline.
- Pick your policy windows. Multilateral moments — IUCN, UNOC, COP — are the highest-leverage stages for purpose-driven organizations. Build the storytelling assets to be ready when they arrive, not in the month before.
- Decentralize the voice without losing the brand. If your network is the asset, the storytelling system has to scale to thousands of voices in dozens of languages while still recognizably being you.
For more on the underlying frameworks behind this work, see the Purpose-Driven Marketing pillar guide and my Forbes piece on how purpose-driven businesses attract investors.