GSG25: One Global Community
Global Schools Group's 25th anniversary, built as one story told three ways: a commemorative book, a walk-through gallery and a microsite. Singapore's Minister for Law opened the celebrations on 18 September 2026.
My scope: Campaign strategy and research, messaging, lead writing and editing on the commemorative book, archive picture research and fact-checking, gallery panel copy and the student guides' notes, microsite design and build, the schools' campaign kit, and day-to-day client lead. Motion's creative team designed the key visual, the book and the gallery.
Make the group behind the school mean something to parents.
Global Schools Group runs 64 campuses in 11 countries and teaches more than 45,000 students. Most of those families know their child's school by name, but far fewer know the group it belongs to, and the anniversary was the first time GSG had set out to tell them.
GSG's leadership gave us the line that shaped everything else in the July strategy session: don't make it about how big GSG has become, make it about how many lives grew larger because of it. The rest of the brief was a list and a deadline. A commemorative book, a walk-through gallery, a microsite and campaign material for every school in the group, all ready for a launch on 18 September.
One story, told three ways.
Research came first: interviews with GSG's leadership, a survey, and a sweep of everything the group had published about itself. It gave the campaign its footing: GSG's teaching, quality systems and pastoral care are real strengths, but they're the means, and a child's growth is the end. From there the idea of opening doors took hold, and Motion's designers turned it into the arches that run through the key visual, the book and the gallery entrance.
Five pillars came out of that work, and they became the spine of everything: the book's five chapters, the gallery's five zones and the messaging every school would use. A parent who read the book and then walked the gallery met the same story in the same order.
Key visual by Motion's creative team.
The book
I was lead writer and editor on the commemorative book, shaping GSG's own manuscript into five chapters and fact-checking it claim by claim before it went to press. One rule ran through every headline: the child and the outcome come first, the institution second. I also worked through the group's photo archive for the founding years, where much of the material was twenty-year-old digital camera files that still had to hold up in print.
The gallery
The book was the source for the gallery, so the panels became a tighter edit of each chapter rather than a separate writing job, which kept both on the same facts. I wrote the panel copy across five colour-coded zones, and the notes the student guides used to walk guests through them. The panels stand free, so the gallery can move on to other campuses after the launch.
The microsite
I designed and built the anniversary microsite: six pages covering the group's school, student and alumni achievements, the year's events and the next 25 years. Its content sits in plain data files, with a consent flag on every named student and alumnus, so GSG's own team can host it and keep it current. It's live at globalschools.com/gsg25.
The campaign kit
Partway through, the plan for the schools changed: they would receive finished artwork from the centre instead of templates to adapt. That changed what the brand guide was for, so I cut it by more than half, to a 41-slide campaign kit explaining what each school gets and how to use it. Alongside it I wrote the admissions slides, the principals' briefing deck, the parent emails and the copy for the poster and standee.
Eleven weeks from strategy session to a minister's launch.
On 18 September 2026, Edwin Tong, Singapore's Minister for Law and Second Minister for Home Affairs, opened the anniversary celebrations at One World International School in Punggol and unveiled the book. The gallery opened to 250 guests, with student guides taking them through it zone by zone. Three weeks before launch, GSG raised the print run from the 100 copies in the original scope to 1,000, and the microsite now lives on GSG's own domain.
The book, the gallery and the microsite were all ready on the day the whole programme had been built around.
