Cool Farm

Making science-led climate action easy to value

I helped Cool Farm turn its scientific credibility into a clear brand story, a shared direction and a practical growth strategy for its member-led platform.

A grower tending soil, from the Cool Farm homepage

Client: Cool Farm Alliance
Sector: Agri-food sustainability: a not-for-profit, member-led climate platform
Timeline: January 2026 onwards, now an ongoing growth retainer
Services: Member research, brand strategy, messaging and verbal identity, growth strategy and 24-month roadmap, team alignment and enablement playbooks

The challenge

Cool Farm is a trusted, science-led platform that helps farmers and food companies measure and reduce their climate impact. Demand for credible sustainability data was growing, but its value was not always clear to its very different members, from global food and drink companies to software partners.

Inside the organisation, teams lacked a shared language for growth and were pulling in different directions. The challenge was to make Cool Farm’s scientific strength easier to understand and value, then give the team a joined-up plan they could use.

What I did

Discovery with members. I ran three workshops on purpose and theory of change, member empathy mapping, and positioning. Alongside these, I carried out 11 one-to-one interviews with food and drink corporates and B2B software partners, grounding the work in members’ own words and capturing the findings in a discovery and insights report.
Brand strategy. I developed three guides for use across departments: Positioning and Brand Identity, Segmentation and Value Creation, and Narrative and Messaging. Together, they connect Cool Farm’s scientific credibility to the value different members recognise, with a clearer story and consistent language.
Growth strategy. Workshops on a shared growth measure and the marketing funnel shaped a growth strategy and 24-month roadmap for 2027 and 2028. The plan brings together platform adoption, member acquisition, retention and brand memorability, rather than treating each as a separate task.
Team alignment. I facilitated an in-person growth and retention day, bringing community development and product together around one picture of healthy growth. A follow-on CRM day with Cool Farm’s systems partner connected the strategy to the tools and processes needed to support it.
From strategy to daily use. I created an implementation summary with one owner per action, alongside enablement playbooks for events, LinkedIn thought leadership and account-based marketing. These turn the strategy into practical work the team can plan, own and carry forward.

Inside the project

Cover slide of the Cool Farm Growth, Acquisition and Retention workshop, day one on strategic direction — Growth, Acquisition & Retention workshop: day one

Strategy slide showing the foundational levers in build order: align, organise and express — Foundational levers: what to fix before scaling growth marketing

Member communications: newsletter header

People talking in front of a Cool Farm event backdrop reading Harvesting actions for impact at scale — Harvesting actions for impact at scale: the Cool Farm event

What changed

11 member interviews grounded the strategy in first-hand insight from food and drink companies and software partners.
A shared language across teams, from describing Cool Farm as a not-for-profit to consistently naming the Cool Farm Platform.
A clearer picture of team alignment: the growth day showed how much people already agreed on and surfaced five themes for making growth work.
A strategy ready for action, with three brand guides, a 24-month roadmap, named action owners and practical enablement playbooks.
A partnership that grew: the project became an ongoing growth retainer supporting Cool Farm’s 2027 plans.

Deliverables

3 discovery workshops
11 member interviews
discovery and insights report
3 brand guides
growth measure and funnel workshops
growth strategy and 24-month roadmap
implementation summary
events, LinkedIn thought leadership and ABM playbooks
growth and retention workshop
CRM alignment day

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