Dotun Soyemi: Positioning People and Organisations for Visibility, Influence and Impact

Dotun Soyemi is a strategic communications professional, entrepreneur and book-launch advisor with over nine years of experience helping people and organisations communicate their value and connect with the audiences that matter to them. As Co-founder of Thirty32 Media & Communications, she works across corporate storytelling, development communications and strategic positioning. Through Launch Your Book with Dotun, she has trained over 1,500 authors, helping them build visibility around their books, reach readers and create opportunities beyond publication.

Her work takes her across corporate communications, investment, food security, women’s development and disability inclusion. She has helped businesses communicate across portfolios of more than a dozen companies, supported thought leadership for professionals engaging international audiences, and contributed to communications for development initiatives. She also serves as Board Chair of The Mum Bridge & Care Foundation, where her work offers a particularly moving example of what can happen when a story reaches someone who decides to do something about what they have seen.

There is a lot to tell about Dotun’s professional journey. But I think the best place to begin is not with the businesses she has helped or the authors she has trained. It is with the young woman who was learning to find her own voice long before helping others find theirs.

Long before the consulting engagements, corporate projects and book launches, there was Adedotun Adejoorin, a young woman who was already taking writing seriously. She wrote about the discipline of becoming a better writer, the lessons that came with the process and the challenge of learning to write from the heart. Her work appeared on platforms including Jabulani Space, The Beautified Network and The W Community. She also contributed to The Sparkle Writers Hub, exploring writing, personal development and life.

What I find interesting about this early chapter is that Dotun was not simply interested in putting words on a page. She was thinking about how to become a better writer, how to keep learning and how to connect with the person reading her words. These were questions she would continue to explore, even as her work took her beyond writing and into the wider world of strategic communications.

We are often quick to celebrate people for the work we see them doing today. We see the results, the opportunities, the recognition and everything that seems to be coming together for them. But how often do we stop to think about the years of work that went into getting them there?

The years of learning, practising, making mistakes, getting better and staying with a craft even when nobody was paying attention. The years of doing the work quietly, long before there was anything to celebrate.

In Dotun’s case, those years of practice were not separate from the work she does today. They were part of how she developed the ability to communicate, connect with an audience and understand what makes a story worth telling.

But writing was not just about the craft. Sometimes, it gave her a place to work through life itself.

Losing her father was heartbreaking. In a reflection on Christmas, Dotun wrote about how the season had changed for her family after his death. She remembered the traditions he had created, the outings and photographs, and the memories he had given her and her sisters. Things that had once been familiar and joyful now carried the weight of someone’s absence. Christmas would never quite be the same again.

If you have ever lost someone who made certain moments special, you will understand how even the happiest traditions can feel different afterwards. The season comes around, the familiar things are still there, but someone is missing. For Dotun, writing about Christmas meant returning to the memories her father had created and the place he continued to occupy in the lives of the family he had left behind.

I imagine that being able to write about his absence, while holding on to the love and memories he left behind, was helpful to Dotun in some way.

Her reflection also turned towards gratitude for her mother and sisters and the memories they could continue to create together. Here, we meet a daughter navigating loss, a sister holding on to family, and a young woman finding words for an experience that had changed her life. It is a different side of Dotun from the communications professional we encounter today, but it gives us a glimpse of the person behind the work.

We cannot say that this experience determined the career she would eventually build. Still, it reminds us that before Dotun began helping other people tell their stories, she was learning what it meant to find the words for her own.

At Babcock University, she studied Mass Communication and graduated with First Class Honours. She was now building a formal foundation in a field she had already begun exploring through writing. Over the years, she would put that knowledge to work in different settings, moving from the written word into corporate environments, development initiatives and ventures of her own. The foundation was growing, but so was the experience that would teach her how to apply what she knew to different people, organisations and audiences.

One of the early chapters of that journey was her work with W Community, the women’s empowerment arm of Access Bank, where she served as Communications Manager.

There was plenty to do. Dotun curated and published more than 50 articles covering careers, business, money and finance, networking, motherhood, relationships and personal productivity. She also worked on campaigns around the W Power Loan and other W Initiative programmes, alongside activities designed to strengthen audience engagement, including Instagram Live sessions, mentoring and networking brunches.

The work brought communication and women’s advancement together in a practical way. It was not enough for opportunities to exist; women needed to know about them, understand what they offered and see how they might be relevant to their lives. That meant finding ways to get people interested, bring them into the conversation and make the information useful to them. It was another opportunity for Dotun to put her communication skills to work, learn from the people she was reaching and deepen her understanding of how messages connect with audiences.

From there, Dotun’s work expanded beyond the women’s empowerment space. She began supporting professionals and organisations that needed to communicate their expertise, explain their work and reach audiences beyond their immediate circles.

One example is her work with Adebayo Adeleke, for whom she supported strategic communications and thought-leadership positioning in security and supply chain management, including communications for international engagements. The subject was different from the work she had done at W Community, but the challenge was familiar: helping people understand what someone knows, what they bring to the table and why their expertise matters.

That ability to move between different subjects and audiences has become an important part of Dotun’s work. Through Thirty32 Media & Communications, which she co-founded, she works across communications strategy, video production, livestreaming and storytelling for businesses, social impact organisations and leaders. The range of this work reflects more than the number of industries she has encountered; it also reflects years of learning how to understand a client’s needs and find the right way to communicate them.

Take, for instance, an investment group with more than 12 businesses across finance, healthcare, energy and hospitality. Each business has its own identity, operations and priorities. When the group needed an anniversary film, Dotun helped develop a narrative that brought the different businesses together under one story without losing what made each one distinct.

It sounds straightforward until you consider the challenge: how do you tell one story about so many different businesses and still give the audience a sense of what makes each of them unique? That is where the work goes beyond simply putting information together. It requires finding the connection that helps people see the bigger picture.

And not every story Dotun works on is about a business. Some are about development initiatives, public issues and the work being done to address them. Here, the challenge is not just to explain what an organisation does, but to help people understand the issue it is working on and why that work deserves their attention.

Her work with the Africa Food Policy Forum is one example. She helped distinguish the platform’s identity from the theme of its annual gathering, allowing the platform to remain recognisable beyond a single event while giving each gathering a clear focus of its own.

With the Nigeria Food Security Project, the work involved another set of communication needs. Dotun supported website messaging and content, including communication for the SPRiNG project. She also contributed to communications around the launch of Nigeria’s first Food Risk Index Report, media coverage and interviews with the project’s founder. Her professional record links the website messaging to the wider effort that secured UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office funding for SPRiNG.

Investment, food policy and food security may seem like very different areas to work in. Yet each requires someone to take information that matters and make it clearer to the people who need to understand it. The subject changes, the audience changes, and the approach may change with it. The work of making the message connect remains. It is a challenge Dotun has encountered in different forms over the years, building on the same communication skills she began developing long before these projects came along.

But sometimes, the connection between a story and its impact becomes much more personal. And Dotun’s involvement with The Mum Bridge & Care Foundation offers a particularly striking example.

The foundation focuses on mothers with disabilities. A documentary created around their experiences reached a viewer who was moved to advocate for a ramp at a school. The ramp was installed, making it possible for a father who uses a wheelchair to visit his child’s school for the first time.

Think about that for a moment. A father had a child at school, but he could not simply walk in to visit. A physical barrier stood between him and an ordinary part of family life that many people never have to think twice about. Then someone watched a story about the experiences of people living with disabilities and decided to act.

That is what makes this story so memorable. The documentary did not install the ramp. Someone had to care enough to take the next step. But the story helped bring a barrier into view, and what had been overlooked became something someone could do something about.

That same interest in what happens after a story reaches its audience shows up in another part of Dotun’s work, this time with people who have stories of their own to tell.

Through Launch Your Book with Dotun, she has trained more than 1,500 authors. Her work helps them think beyond the excitement of publishing a book and consider what comes next. Finishing a manuscript is an achievement, but getting a book published does not automatically bring readers. Authors also have to think about how to introduce their work to the world, sustain interest and help the right people discover what they have written.

And Dotun has results to point to. In one book-marketing campaign, more than 120 copies were sold within two weeks without paid advertising. She has also helped authors secure media visibility, including coverage in national newspapers. In one case, strong reader feedback encouraged an author to go on to write a second book.

It also brings us back to the young Dotun who was thinking about the discipline of writing and the importance of reaching a reader. Today, she is helping other writers make that connection for themselves. She knows that publishing a book is one milestone. Helping it find the people who will read it, respond to it and perhaps even be changed by it is another. The years she spent developing her own craft now inform how she helps other people approach theirs.

Her interest in people’s growth and development extends beyond books and communications. Through initiatives such as the ROAR Conference, including The Sharpening Edition: Weight & Wisdom, Dotun creates space for conversations around women’s personal development, intentional living and generational legacy. The conference brings people together to reflect on how they live, the choices they make and the kind of future they want to build.

When I look across Dotun’s journey, I see the same thread running through the different things she does. Whether she is helping an organisation communicate its value, supporting a development initiative or helping an author reach readers, the work is about making a connection between a message and the people who need to hear it. And sometimes, as the story of the father who finally got to visit his child’s school shows, that connection can lead to something beyond visibility. It can move someone to act.

Today, we see the different sides of her work, from corporate communications to development projects and book launches. But behind all of that is a woman who has spent years learning her craft, practising it in different settings and building on what she knows. The work we see today did not happen overnight. It grew through years of writing, learning, trying different things and getting better along the way. And I think that is worth recognising. Because sometimes, when we celebrate where people are today, we forget to acknowledge all the years it took them to get there.