The context

Debilitating poverty, an insatiable demand for cheap labor and a backdrop of political upheaval and corruption creates a perfect storm for human rights abuse in Thailand’s fishing industry.

In 2019, a UN-ACT Report in Thailand found that a mindblowing 7 in 10 fishermen showed signs of forced labor, including dangerous conditions, low or no pay, withheld documents, and months or even years out at sea. As the third largest seafood exporter in the world, Thailand’s labor practices have certainly reached your local grocer.

Patima Thungpuchayakul has spent 15 years on a mission to rescue enslaved and abandoned fishermen in international waters, and prevent further human trafficking at home. Her daring rescues were captured in the award-winning film, Ghost Fleet.

In 2019, AGO supported LPN through strategic decision-making, creative storytelling, and technical and operations upgrades that set her organization up on a new and exciting trajectory.

Our strategy

Policy-makers and other influential bodies still misunderstand the many layers of vulnerability that lead to human exploitation. Our strategy was to clarify the relationship between LPN’s different efforts, and to reveal the virtuous cycle between urgent rescue and long term prevention.

We focused on three core areas:

Build a breakthrough narrative that elevates LPN from “busy and active” to “strategic and high impact” by connecting the dots between their efforts

Equip the team to tell their story well at every touchpoint, with high quality materials

Support LPN’s long term sustainability through technical and operational upgrades, and high impact fundraising materials, templates and promotional tools

Brand identity

AGO partnered with LPN to articulate a powerful brand positioning for their work and a single, salient narrative that connects the dots between the problems they were solving, their unique, empowering approaches and the resulting network of survivors who go on to mentor and guide others like them.

Based on this strategy, we elevated every aspect of their brand identity: logo, fonts, colors, tone, imagery and corporate collateral. This offered LPN’s leadership and staff high end brand materials as they headed into a period of increased visibility due to their starring role in the movie Ghost Fleet.

The name Labour Protection Network was also adjusted from the previous Labour Rights Promotion Network to better reflect its active posture in advocacy, and tie to its well-known acronym.

Branded storytelling

We applied the new brand across all materials, providing LPN’s leadership and staff with simple but powerful ways to explain their work.

We reworked their most commonly-delivered presentations in the new format, giving them the brand polish worthy of their extraordinary achievements, and giving them a strong platform for their international advocacy.

We also reworked their website from the ground up, weaving together their brand narrative and services.

We poured through LPN's vast photo collection to cull a set of images that had storytelling power: empowering, flattering photography that revealed the common humanity between the reader, the activist and the population served by LPN's great work, and action-orientated photography, that highlighted the lengths to which LPN would go for trafficking prevention.

We also licensed a beautiful collection of photography by Luke Duggleby that captured the human toll of overfishing.

Sustainable operations

A thorough review of their internal operations, human resources and financial systems revealed an opportunity for a more sustainable approach.

AGO provided support and guidance for a full technology upgrade, and refreshed all fundraising materials to include strategic, programming and financial details needed to advance fundraising conversations.

With our help, LPN was able to secure a flexible, general operating grant to support their internal operations and the completion of their new rehabilitation & skills-training center in Samut Sakhon, Thailand.

The outcomes

We believe it’s essential for all of our clients to feel complete ownership over the materials and tools we develop together. The result of our work continues to be seen throughout LPN’s active media presence and the successful launch of their groundbreaking new rehabilitation center.