The Global Open Data for Agriculture & Nutrition (GODAN) initiative, is a 500 member organisation supported by national governments, non-governmental, international and private sector organisations that propagates for open data in agriculture and nutrition to scientifically combat world hunger and food security.

GODAN organized a 2-day Summit in New York on the margins of the UN General Assembly with the aim to make all data in agriculture and nutrition freely available for better policy and decision-making by 2050, when the global population is expected to hit 9 billion.

For the first time in history, world leaders and prominent international figures joined researchers, farmers, students and public, private and non-profit organisations, to showcase the impact of open data for Agriculture and Nutrition around the world. The Summit included high-level speeches, a hackathon by young innovators, exhibits showcasing the importance of open-data and the unveiling of the results from an online open-data revolution. The petition will be handed over at the UN.

Sterling devised and implemented the global external and internal communications strategy for the summit. As a GODAN spokesperson and global coordinator, Sterling’s involvement in the campaign was imperative in spreading awareness of GODAN’s goals: to illustrate the opening, the use and importance of agriculture and nutritional data.

The campaign was multi-layered and included raising awareness of all event features, developing hero case studies to illustrate the impact of open data, coordinating high level interviews with key spokespersons from the UK, Africa and USA government, defining key messaging, conducting media and crisis briefings, creating digital content and copy-writing.

Our campaign reached over 2.7billion readers with coverage appearing in over 250 media outlets. GODANSummit2016 and #OpenData trended on Twitter in New York & London during the Summit.

Sterling is now working with GODAN to launch the open data revolution to the private sector.