Case Studies

I was introduced through a mutual friend. The owners were an elderly couple who weren't looking for a polished agency pitch. They just needed the problem fixed. I proposed running the strategy first and sorting out payment after based on whether it actually worked.

The café had around 300 Instagram followers. Posts were basic phone shots of food with no real strategy behind them. 20 to 30 likes per post, zero comments. The food was genuinely excellent. The problem was just visibility, getting in front of the right people at the right moment.

1. Show the food properly. Professional photography and short-form video to show what the café was actually serving, plus testimonial-style clips of real customers reacting to it. The food was the story.

2. Build a trackable mechanic. Happy hour campaign across breakfast, lunch, and dinner: show the post at the counter, get a free item. A direct, measurable link between Instagram activity and people walking through the door.

3. Bring the family into it. The owners had adult children willing to learn. Brought them into the process, how to shoot, caption, and think about content. Kept the account active and authentic beyond the campaign.

4. Follow the data. Early posts got comments but lower-than-expected reach. Analytics showed we were posting outside peak activity windows. Shifted posting times to match when the audience was actually scrolling, and engagement climbed quickly after that.

The campaign worked well enough that the client wound down the promotion before the three months were up. Organic foot traffic had grown to the point where the free-item offer wasn't needed anymore. They stayed on as a retainer client and referred new clients to Cirkall.

The venue had steady foot traffic but wanted to shift more of it through their online booking system. Advance notice meant better staffing decisions and fewer walk-offs, which mattered to them. A 10% discount for booking online before dining was the mechanic: simple, trackable, and tied directly to a measurable action.

We ran social media and targeted digital content around the offer, using venue photography, atmosphere shots, and food content to give people a reason to book. Weekly bookings grew from around 20 to 40+ over three months.

Noticed that static posts were consistently losing 20 to 30% of their reach every few weeks, while reels were reaching 2 to 3 times more people regardless of how long they'd been live. The algorithm was clearly telling us something the content calendar wasn't picking up on.

Shifted the content strategy toward short-form video and reach improved 30 to 50%. On top of that, adjusted posting schedules using audience activity data. Posting during peak scroll hours lifted early engagement (likes, comments, shares in the first few hours) by 15 to 25%, which compounded into better overall reach per post.

Alongside the strategy shift, I led a storytelling campaign that sourced personal stories from across the JY community, shaped them into written and visual content, and distributed them across channels. The authenticity was the whole point. Produced content from an NFP doesn't land the same way real community voices do.

Fire is a Perth-based alternative band who hired me as their primary photographer, videographer, and social media manager in 2023. Over a year working together, their concert attendance grew from 80 to 150 across three shows, and they gained 200+ followers from a standing start on a new Instagram account.

I shot, edited, and posted all content across the year — promo shoots, behind-the-scenes, and performance footage. The band disbanded in 2024, but the numbers held up across the full run of shows.

Handled everything from promotion to logistics to on-the-day communications. Coordinated with reps from UWA, Curtin, ECU, and Notre Dame to lock in their participation, produced event collateral, and kept 900+ students and families in the loop via email and WhatsApp.

Running an event this size through a volunteer organisation with no full-time staff meant you had to be organised well ahead of time. Clear systems, early planning, and reliable follow-through on every moving part.

Led two workstreams at once for a youth community conference: building a full multi-page WordPress site from scratch, and designing a strategy to get people registered months before the November event date.

Rather than a standard early-bird discount, I proposed a tiered raffle mechanic: every week someone registered ahead of the event, they earned an extra entry into a draw with progressively better prizes. It created real urgency without feeling like a sales tactic, and the whole thing ran on its own after handover.

Selected Rocket Fuel Café on the UWA campus as the client for a consulting group project. No one stepped up to lead it, so I did. Directed the research phase, developed both core recommendations, and presented to the business owner directly.

Loyalty stamp card: Buy 9 coffees, get a kilo of beans on the 10th. A simple, high-retention mechanic for a captive university audience. The café adopted it and still runs the program. Gamified website: Interactive design language targeting UWA students. Sound idea, but cost barriers meant it wasn't implemented at the time.