Explaining the Pact
A public communications series breaking the Pact for the Future into specific issues, examples and outcomes.
Office of the President of the United Nations General AssemblyMay to July 2026
Context and challenge
The Pact for the Future covers issues ranging from peace and climate action to digital governance, youth participation and reform of the international system. Its breadth is part of its importance, but it also makes the agreement difficult to explain to anyone who does not already follow multilateral policy.
The challenge was not only to explain what the Pact contained. It was to answer a more basic question: why should people care?
Summarising the full agreement would have produced a long list of commitments with little sense of what they meant beyond the document itself. The series instead needed to identify individual parts of the Pact and connect them to concrete issues, country examples and results.
It also needed to make clear that adoption was not the end of the story. The significance of the Pact depended on what happened afterwards, how implementation was followed and whether its commitments led to visible change.
My role
I helped lead the editorial strategy and campaign sequence within the Office’s communications team.
I selected themes for the series, developed the main concepts and shaped the visual direction across videos, explainers and event content.
I developed the introductory “Where do you see yourself in the future?” video and helped establish how the wider series would move from the Pact as a broad political agreement to individual issues, examples and results.
Several implementation stories were produced by fellows under my supervision. I set the editorial and visual direction, trained them to use the campaign’s visual system, reviewed their research and drafts, and guided each piece through production and clearance.
This allowed the series to cover more themes while maintaining consistency across its writing, design and framing.
Research, writing and event coverage were developed collaboratively with the wider team. My role was to shape that material into concepts, scripts and formats suited to different platforms and audiences.
Instagram carried the most visual and accessible explanations. X focused on events, implementation updates and real-time coverage. LinkedIn provided fuller policy context for diplomatic, civil society and professional audiences.
Slide 1 / 4
Key decisions
Choose examples, not summaries
Trying to explain the entire Pact at once would have flattened very different policy areas into a list. The series instead selected individual themes and gave each one enough space to be explained clearly. Country examples, figures and specific outcomes showed what implementation could look like without claiming to represent every part of the agreement.
Start with the heart or the pocket
The editorial test was whether an issue connected to something people could experience directly, either emotionally or materially. Topics such as digital violence, youth participation, climate impacts and artificial intelligence became more immediate when the content explained how they affected people’s safety, opportunities, rights or livelihoods. The phrase “the heart or the pocket” provided an internal test for choosing stories. It was not a public campaign slogan.
Treat implementation as the story
The Pact had already been adopted. The more useful question was what followed. The series focused on implementation through explainers, country examples and coverage of the stocktake meeting, rather than presenting adoption as the conclusion of the political process. Each output needed to show either what action had begun, what result had emerged or where further progress was still required.
Match the format to the subject
The introductory video gave the series a broad starting point. Carousels were used for subjects that required a structured, step-by-step explanation. Event content focused on political follow-up, implementation and accountability. The project also revealed the limits of text-heavy formats. Several subjects would have benefited from interviews, field footage and direct contributions from people working on implementation. Those formats would have made the connection between an international agreement and its practical consequences more immediate.
Slide 1 / 5
Slide 1 / 5
Outcome
By the end of July 2026, content published through the Office’s accounts had recorded more than 246,000 views and impressions across Instagram, X and LinkedIn. The series was also supported and amplified by United Nations entities and Member States. The SDG Action team became a collaborator across the series, helping extend its reach and connect individual outputs to wider communications around implementation.
The project established a repeatable structure for communicating a policy framework that was too broad to explain in one piece. Each output focused on one issue, one example or one result, giving audiences a specific reason to pay attention. The series also demonstrated where the approach could be improved. With more production time, I would have used more video and fewer text-led carousels. Interviews and partnerships with people working on implementation in different countries could have brought more voices into the campaign and shown more directly how the Pact connected to work taking place on the ground. Broad policy frameworks do not become accessible simply by being shortened. They need to be divided into specific issues, examples and outcomes that people can follow.
Slide 1 / 5
Credits Developed within the communications team at the Office of the President of the United Nations General Assembly. I helped lead the editorial strategy and campaign sequence, selected themes, developed concepts and shaped the visual direction across videos, explainers and event content. Research, writing and event coverage were produced collaboratively with the wider team. Several implementation stories were produced by fellows under my editorial and visual supervision.
