We’re problem solvers
Team Profiles
Ian Cairns
- About Ian Cairns
- client liaison
Ian leads the needs analysis and planning for our client projects and guides them to completion. Having worked with a variety of nonprofit and advocacy organizations – and on the other side of web project management – Ian understands our clients’ needs. He also comes up brilliant, efficient ways to meet these needs and get results. He excels at tailoring communications strategies to meet our clients’ distinct goals and coordinates their execution with our engineers.
Ian has always been passionate about helping organizations create a better world. With a background as a writer and with a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Colorado, he helped organizations with public policy communications before coming to Development Seed, particularly on HIV/AIDS and international women's health issues. Ian is also a dedicated volunteer and spends much of his free time mentoring college students and helping with strategic planning for small organizations with focuses ranging from stopping human trafficking to urban community development.
Since joining Development Seed in 2006, Ian has guided successful projects for more than 20 clients, ranging from small environmental nonprofits to large international organizations like the United Nations Millennium Campaign and the World Bank.
community building, Getting Things Done, cycling, supporting urban farming, good Italian food, mountains, changing the world
- Interests
community building, Getting Things Done, cycling, supporting urban farming, good Italian food, mountains, changing the world
We refer to ourselves as communications plumbers. Our job is to come into your organization, figure out your communications goals, and then get you there. We devise strategies to unclog your communications channels and build tools to help you easily get your messages out to the right audience.
But we are more than this. Our team is banded together around our common mission to build creative communications solutions for organizations doing world-changing work. This shared goal drives our work and lets us push the limits to create truly innovative and powerful tools.
This mission is reflected in our history, which is slightly different than that of most communications companies. We started Development Seed in the mountains of Peru to deploy communications portals for international development organizations working on the ground in Latin America. The first tools we built were for small grassroots organizations working to rebuild the region’s economic infrastructure and create stability through the provision of basic social services like healthcare. While over the years our clients have changed, our underlying goal has not – to help organizations we believe in expand their impact to get world changing results.
We follow this mantra in all that we do, including running our office. We reduce our environmental impact by using smart lighting, cutting waste, using a green cleaning service, and offsetting the carbon we emit in our office and when we travel so we are carbon neutral. We even help our clients offset the carbon cost of their online tools. As much as we want to reduce our impact globally, we know we need to act locally too. That’s why we support local efforts like DC Greenworks, which plants gardens on top of city buildings to stem toxic runoff and improve air and water quality.