Accompanying What Matters: Strategic Impact Communication in 2025

A chronicle of a year in which strategic communications, creativity, and technology helped connect initiatives from the territories with global audiences, shaping conversations in media and on digital platforms.

During 2025, Colmena Lab operated as what it is: a specialized strategic communications agency with global impact, combining strategy, creativity, and technology to accompany those who are transforming the world from their own spaces.

This year began with open questions and more uncertainties than certainties. The global context was not helpful: fragmented debates, saturated agendas, and urgent decisions that seemed to be postponed time and again.

Amidst this scenario, our daily work was not about amplifying messages for the sake of amplification. It was about something more concrete and, at the same time, more complex: accompanying real processes so they would not be diluted by media noise, tides of information, and millions of communication products.

This blog post reviews this year. Not as a list of achievements, but as a sequence of stories, lessons, and decisions that explain why 2025 was a turning point in how we think about strategic communications and advocacy.

Throughout 2025, we supported more than 16 international processes and projects related to climate change, biodiversity, human rights, justice, intersectionality, and conservation. In every case, the question was the same: what does this process need to create impact without being overexposed, to scale without losing its meaning?

The Small Decisions that Sustain Great Processes

Many of the stories we amplified in 2025 began as everyday conversations.

• A meeting to redefine spokesmanship.

• A draft that needed context.

• Data that was solid but couldn't find an audience.

  
  

Colmena Lab's work was to connect these dots: to translate, organize, prioritize, and create. With narrative, with data, and with political and media analysis specific to each case.

The global reach—over 2.5 billion of potential readers in 190 countries and in more than 17 languages—was the consequence of successfully inserting our allies' agendas and messages into relevant and meaningful conversations, influencing the spaces where decisions are made.

Below are five stories that help explain how that journey was built.

Five Stories to Understand 2025

Yaku Mama: From the Rivers of the Amazon to the Global Stage

This is the story of how a communication strategy allowed an Amazonian mobilization to enter the global climate agenda before COP30 even began.

The Yaku Mama Amazon Flotilla, a coalition of 60 Indigenous and allied organizations led by the Quipa Collective, decided to travel 3,000 kilometers along the rivers of four Amazon countries before the COP30 climate negotiations started. Not to document a journey, but to position territorial realities and solutions when there was still room to make an impact.

The challenge was to accompany the journey with a transmedia strategy designed to provide support during 29 days of navigation and 10 days of agenda at COP30 to: produce materials from the river, coordinate with over 100 allies, read the pulse of the global conversation, and find the right moment for the messages to circulate without the story getting trapped in an exotic view of the Amazon and in echo chambers.

This work made it possible to connect the local with the global so that the demands and solutions from the territories could reach global audiences with the goal of influencing the negotiation table and being reflected in concrete discussions about the protection of PIACI, the energy transition, exploitation-free zones, and direct funding.

As a result of this joint journey, we achieved:

• Reaching 2.5 billion of potential readers in 190 countries, speaking 17 languages.

• 814 press mentions, having a record of 308 articles in 24 hours the day before COP30 began.

• Mobilizing ~11 million unique users on social media and the web.

• Maintaining 97.3% positive or neutral sentiment on Indigenous Peoples and extractivism.

STAR: When Science Becomes Decisions that Protect Life

How to translate complex science into communication products.

The STAR metric, developed by the IUCN, offers a way to prioritize conservation actions based on extinction risk. We worked with the science team to design guides so that governments, organizations, and technical teams could use this information without losing rigor. The process involved organizing and translating scientific complexity and designing reading paths and data visualizations that connected the metric with concrete decisions.

The guides were presented at the World Conservation Congress and began to circulate as active tools to accelerate nature-positive actions across all sectors. And because our work knows no borders, we are working on translations into French and Spanish.

The Right to Exist: PIACI on the Global Agenda

Mobilizing and engaging audiences for the right to exist.

This year, we developed and implemented a communication strategy that successfully positioned the work of GTI PIACI for the protection of Indigenous Peoples in Isolation and Initial Contact (PIACI) in digital media. The work included highlighting regional and international advocacy actions aimed at protecting these peoples.

Our communication challenge was to position a narrative capable of pressuring governments for their recognition and protection. During that year, Colmena Lab supported this process through a digital communication strategy aimed at strengthening the visibility and informational coherence of GTI PIACI.

This support included managing digital communities on Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, and the web; producing collaborative content based on connection and support, participation and engagement, and education and information; disseminating timely and verified information at key moments for GTI PIACI organizations; coordinating with communicators in different Amazon territories; and providing real-time coverage of international advocacy events and spaces.

Thanks to this, we achieved:

• Mobilizing 558,606 people on digital media.

• Reaching +170 million people through social media and the web.

• Creating over 1,000 collaborative content pieces.

• Raising the global visibility of GTI PIACI and the PIACI of South America.

Fundación Futuro: Caring for Life in All Its Forms

How to communicate science, innovation, community, and business to amplify a complex sustainable conservation model.

With Fundación Futuro, the work in 2025 was aimed at broadening the conversation about conservation in the Andean Chocó.

Beyond traditional approaches, our work was to integrate science, local governance, and financial innovation into a strategic narrative, capable of engaging with both broad and specialized audiences—technical, multilateral, and from the private sector.

We focused on consolidating the Foundation's presence in conversations about conservation, innovation, and local governance in the national, regional, and international conversation. Communication was conceived as a system to connect host communities, businesses, governments, and allies, translating complex models into understandable and verifiable stories.

This support allowed the Foundation's international positioning to align with the national and regional conversation, relying on strategic planning, participatory community diagnosis, the construction of impact stories, and a media strategy aimed at influential audiences.

This process accompanied the international recognition of Roque Sevilla with the IUCN Kenton Miller Award, as well as his participation in international events like the "Bridging Regions" Summit, reinforcing the credibility of the model driven by the Foundation and its innovative initiatives.

Key results of the 2025 support:

• 77.9 million of potential readers, with a presence on high-traffic platforms and media, especially in Spain.

• 134 mentions in specialized press, prioritizing media on environment, sustainability, economy, and politics.

• 3 strategic international audiences activated: Ecuador, Spain, and Panama.

• 0% negative sentiment.

It’s Not Just Resisting, but Leading: Indigenous Women in Action

How to connect territorial voices with global audiences.

The 25th anniversary of the International Indigenous Women's Forum (FIMI) was an opportunity to position their role in global spaces.

In 2025, our work went beyond visibility; it sought to amplify FIMI's work through narratives that showcase their political proposals, strategies, and concrete solutions that originate from the territories and have the capacity to be replicated and expanded globally.

We accompanied Indigenous Women from around the world at the 69th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW69) in New York, FIMI's 25th-anniversary event in Lima, and the First Global Summit of Indigenous Women and Youth held in Belém do Pará within the framework of COP30.

This support allowed their agendas to enter global media spaces from a different standpoint, with a greater capacity for dialogue.

As a result of this joint journey, we achieved:

• Reaching 1.16 million of potential readers in 40 countries, speaking more than 10 languages.

• 225 press mentions in globally relevant media outlets such as The Guardian, El País, Australia Associated Press, and Wired.

• News coverage in 5 regions of the world: Asia-Pacific, Africa, Europe, North America, and Latin America.

Looking Ahead

In January, we will share an analysis of trends in strategic communications and advocacy, built from these experiences: what has changed, what tensions have deepened, and what the global context will demand in the coming years.

We will continue to support organizations, communities, scientific teams, and social leaders working in complex contexts. Our role will remain the same: to support communication, advocacy, and positioning processes so that their messages, evidence, and proposals find the right moment and means to continue transforming the world.

At Colmena Lab, we work with organizations, companies, and institutions on the design of strategic narratives, public positioning, and media intelligence for complex contexts.

We use evidence, political analysis, and conversation analysis to convert processes, data, and decisions into strategies, actions, and communication materials capable of entering, and sustaining themselves within relevant conversations.

At Colmena Lab, we accompany organizations, companies, and institutions in the design of strategic narratives, public positioning, and media intelligence for complex contexts.

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