about me

With 25 years as an Individual Giving specialist in the UK not-for-profit sector, both client and agency side, working on big multi-channel integrated campaigns, I will bring a wealth of experience and insight to your creative,

I’ll help you tailor to your target audiences to drive brand engagement, awareness, salience, consideration and ultimately conversion, so you can hit those all-important KPIs for both cash and regular giving.

Agency side I have worked with some of the UK’s biggest charities, and as a client I have worked with some of the biggest charity-focused creative and media agency partners in the country, so I understand your needs and how to work best to help you achieve your goals.

And I understand the the need to make the most of ever-tightening fundraising and brand comms budgets.

An English degree from Oxford, a Masters in Advance Theatre Practice from the Royal School of Speech and Drama and a parallel career in the dramatic arts mean I can bring your stories to life - whether that be focussed on beneficiaries, frontline staff, volunteers, or community activists and the varied projects each might be involved in.

I can help you stand out in the crowded spaces of today’s attention economy with creatives that will inspire and remain with audiences.

Based in Central London with good transport links and a love of working in-person, I am happy to work both remotely or to join you and your team in person where relevant and depending on your preference.

LinkedIn Profile:

Close-up of Kal Aise, a man with short black hair, a beard, and a nose ring, wearing a black zip-up jacket with colourful stripes on the shoulder, sitting indoors.

“You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

For me, all charity brand and fundraising creative falls under the above formulation. As a sector we have work we want to achieve to the betterment of society, the nation, the world. And to do this we need support.

Positive change in the world never just happens.

It is fought for. By people inspiring people.

Change can only happen through people coming together. With purpose. Willing to take action. But no cause and no campaign is the same, so there is no one-size-fits-all creative formula.

Audiences differ, asks differ - you might be recruiting or cross-selling to race participants via socials, you might be speaking to the loved ones of someone living with Parkinson’s or the effects of a stroke to ask if they can help with an RG.

I’ll ensure I understand the voice and approach that’s needed to help you reach those people. Inspire them. Bring them to your cause.

Throughout my fundraising career, I have loved finding ways to improve creatives so that audiences are more strongly engaged, and when my roles have allowed to build that from scratch based on a brief.

With my Advance Theatre Practice Masters, English degree, and a keen interest in Behavioural Science, I have always seen fundraising and brand creative as a conversation between organisation and audience, an ongoing dialogue.

To inform. inspire. delight.

Informing of the raw realities of problems in the world, inspiration and delight in hearing and becoming part of the solution to those problems.

I love making a case for the work an organisation does, telling the stories that reach audiences both intellectually and emotionally, fashioned with an understanding of rhetoric and the art of persuasion.

Behavioural science teaches us that most people make decisions based on emotions, and then afterwards think through the intellectual arguments to validate their decision.

emotion is always key.

But emotional draw without the context of evidence, facts, statistics, stories of real people and situations brought to life by the skill of a lifelong storyteller – both in terms of the problem and solution - would only be half the picture. It would bring little sustained attention beyond that immediate moment.

To inspire long-term support, audiences need to really understand how that situation has come about, what measures can solve it… or ideally, prevent it happening in the first place.

Audiences need to see ambition.

Conviction. Particularly now. The big statements that convey the important core objectives.

Crisis mass awareness brand activity “Homelessness is is too big to be ignored” (2022) - a project for which I was IG representative. Creative Agency: Mother

But they also need tangible details, small moments they can empathise with, relate to, so they can more fully understand and believe in the asks we’re making.

It is this challenge of marrying the two and creating that dynamic balance to create sustained attention that has always drawn me to charity creative work.

Whether over a four page mailpack, a social post with less than a hundred words of copy, or an OOH poster with two sentences that leads to a fuller landing page, that dynamic balance and what we need to achieve is the same.

Inform. Inspire. Delight. 

And for me, someone’s decision to donate is the ultimate sign that the message has landed, that we have done our job as fundraisers and storytellers.

Especially in the current climate, where people have less to give, to inspire someone to be part of a cause, to part with hard-earned money, tells me I have done my job.

It is the ultimate validation.

Measurable. Tangible.

Just like the solutions we in our sector seek to provide.

Having learnt so much in a decade working client-side at Whizz-Kidz and Crisis on every IG channel imaginable, I am moving to freelance creative and consulting to share my knowledge and skills across the sector, as I had in many years in Telemarketing.

I enjoy engaging with a wide range of causes, established and new, getting a broad picture of the sector while getting underneath your different stories, your focus, your language and brand identity to help you produce campaigns that get the right message to the right people at the right time.

To effect change.

Real and sustainable change.

A male comedian, Kal Aise on stage performing at a comedy club called The Comedy Store with a microphone, audience in the foreground, club logo with laughing face on a blue curtain, and a poster promoting the charity Crisis in the background.

I have always been someone who wants to use my life to bring positive change in the world. And I have always been a storyteller.

In my parallel career in film, theatre and TV I have always been drawn to stories with purpose, with something important to say about people, about the world.

I was drawn to hip hop at an early age, a musical genre with social purpose and protest intrinsic to its being before commercialism invaded – and words, so many words.

I do a bit of stand-up, always with a point to make, and my first solo-written full length play surrounds issues of toxic masculinity, misogyny and the need for men to not stand by and let it happen.

“You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

This is who I am. In my own writing, and in the writing and creative that I work on for you.

Give me a brief.

Let your work inspire me.

together we’ll inspire others.