Alice Turns 10

In 2025, Alice is celebrating our 10-year anniversary. Here, our founder and CEO, Martina Quinn, reflects on our first decade in business.

10 years ago, I was single, child-free, living by myself, and about to leave my job of eight years with no real idea of what to do next.

Fast forward a decade, and I’ve moved home twice, gotten married, had two children… and spent a lot of the past 10 years building Alice into what we are today.

Alice’s First Steps

When I started working for myself in 2015, I had no real masterplan. My expertise was in communications, and I was particularly interested in social justice campaigns, so I figured I’d freelance for a while and see what happened next.

One of the first projects I worked on was with Language – the creative studio that remains a close partner of ours to this day. We delivered Make Rights Real, a campaign for the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, focused on bringing to life the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We partnered with The Irish Times to commission several well-known authors to choose an article from the Declaration and write an original creative response. And we gathered and published the stories of real people whose personal circumstances highlighted different elements of the Declaration.

In autumn 2015, I managed a communications strategy project for AONTAS, an organisation that remains a valued client to this day. I also worked with the lovely people at Discovery Gospel Choir – Ireland’s most multicultural choir – to launch their ‘Look Up’ album and promotional tour.

Around the same time, I worked with Ian McKinley and his family on the #LetIanPlay campaign. Ian, a professional rugby player with an Italian club, lost the sight in his left eye in 2010, but made a remarkable comeback, pioneering the use of protective goggles to allow him to continue his rugby career. While World Rugby had sanctioned a trial of the goggles in 2014, the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU) blocked their use in Ireland. #LetIanPlay aimed to highlight this unfairness, and put pressure on the IRFU to change their stance.

In just 24 hours, we attracted 10,000 signatures for a petition calling on the IRFU to “let Ian McKinley play on Irish soil”. Des Cahill featured the campaign as his lead story on ‘Morning Ireland’ sports, and a particular high point was seeing Brian O’Driscoll’s signature added to the petition list.

Ultimately, the IRFU reversed its decision and allowed players, like Ian, to wear protective goggles during games on Irish soil. And Ian, of course, continued his successful rugby career and is now a pundit, coach, motivational speaker and published author (our campaign gets a lovely mention in his book).

Alice Gets Bigger

By this stage in Alice’s life, things had gotten busy enough for me to need help. I began growing the team by taking on part-time consultants. And then, in early 2016, Niamh became our first fulltime employee and has stuck around ever since!

We delivered our first bilingual (English / Irish) campaign in 2016, working with the arts collective Guthanna Binne Síoraí / Everlasting Voices on the launch of an album featuring the poems of 1916.

In the same year, we began working with the Irish Research Council (IRC) on the #LoveIrishResearch campaign, a partnership that continued until the IRC was disbanded last year. We also delivered our first Springboard+ campaign for the Higher Education Authority. And we worked with the HEA to launch the National Gender Equality Review of Irish Higher Education Institutions, a groundbreaking report focused on addressing significant gender inequalities in higher education.

Sticking with the topic of gender equality, WorkEqual (which, at that time, was called Dress for Success Dublin), was one of our earliest clients in Alice and, in November 2016, we delivered their first Equal Pay Day campaign. Over the following six years, we developed that campaign into a high-profile annual initiative, focused on raising awareness and addressing the root causes of the gender pay gap. All this work paid off in 2021, when the Gender Pay Gap Information Act became law.

Alice and Repeal

During 2016, we began working closely with Ailbhe Smyth and her small team at the Coalition to Repeal the Eighth Amendment (Ailbhe remains a valued collaborator to this day).

Our work with the Coalition continued until 2018, when we also managed the launch of Together for Yes, the national civil society campaign to remove the Eighth Amendment (the clause that effectively outlawed abortion) from the Irish Constitution. This launch attracted headlines across the globe.

We were in Dublin Castle in May 2018 as the official referendum results were announced: an overwhelming 66% vote in favour of Repeal, marking a watershed moment for reproductive rights.

And we continued to work with the movement’s leaders in the following years, including on the 2019 event to announce the inclusion of Ailbhe and her Together for Yes Co-Directors on the ‘TIME 100’ list, TIME Magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Alice in the Wider World

By this stage, Alice had established a presence in Northern Ireland: Louise had joined the team in 2017, heading up our Belfast office.

In 2019, we were selected to join UEN-Pomilio Blumm, a global communications network, headquartered in Italy. With partners in almost 70 countries, it has been ranked one of the world’s top three PR networks. We continue to provide Irish insights and hands-on support to Pomilio Blumm for major EU and other campaigns.

Over the past 10 years, we’ve also done lots of other international work – delivering communications training and strategy sessions in Vienna and Reykjavik, bringing clients on study tours to Brussels, managing PR campaigns and events in the UK and the USA…

Alice’s Social Impact

In 2019, we worked with SOLAS on TEDxMountjoyPrison, the first TEDx event to take place in an Irish prison.

The following summer, we managed the launch of ‘Future FET’, SOLAS’s five-year strategy to reposition Further Education and Training as an attractive, in-demand and quality choice for school-leavers and lifelong learners. This was the first in-person event we managed during Covid times, meaning social distancing was front of mind.

The campaigns we worked on in our earliest years very much sowed the seeds for what Alice has become today. Over the past decade, we’ve strengthened our focus on social impact PR, delivering award-winning campaigns and events for NGOs, public-sector bodies and movements seeking to achieve progressive change. We’ve worked to promote LGBTQ+ rights, climate action, health awareness, integration and anti-racism measures, children’s rights, active ageing, better housing for all, more diverse education options, and so much more…

We’ve delivered training to thousands of people, ranging from CEOs, academics, start-up founders and business leaders to elected representatives, civil society trailblazers and grassroots activists.

We’ve supported election campaigns for European, Seanad, general and local elections.

We’ve had events with President Michael D. Higgins, four different Taoisigh, countless Ministers, and hugely inspiring guest speakers from Ireland and further afield.

In 2023, we launched our ‘Alice Asks…’ event series, designed to give our clients and friends access to acclaimed speakers who are working to make the world a better place. The first speaker we featured set the tone: Anat Shenker-Osorio, a progressive messaging guru, working to break down the divisions that are currently rampant across the USA.

Last year, we launched the Alice Academy for Activists, a free three-day residential bootcamp to equip activists with strategic campaigning skills.

The Alice Family

All of this work was made possible because we have a brilliant team of committed, passionate and expert PR pros – and we are lucky enough to work with clients and partners who share our ambition for progressive social change.

Our Chairperson, Dermot, joined the team in 2019, and now leads our Board. Meanwhile, some of those who made a huge contribution to the company have since moved on, and I’m delighted to see former colleagues doing great things in politics, business, the public sector and civil society.

Since 2015, we’ve had #TeamAlice engagements, weddings, babies, and new homes – and we’ve celebrated and commiserated with our team-mates around countless other milestones in their lives.

I feel extremely lucky to have a job I love. I get to meet amazing people, I work with an incredible team, and I am so proud of what we have achieved over the past 10 years.

More than ever, there is a need for us all now to champion progressive change and fight hard to safeguard civil rights. At Alice, we remain committed to this cause. Here’s to the next 10 years!