Flow’s 20th year defined by teamwork, trophies and travel

If there’s one thing that stands out when you ask Flowstars for their highlights of Flow’s 20th year in business, it’s people.

Our motto is that we do work we love with people we like. I can tell you that we do love our colleagues, and we love many of our clients!

That and travelling. So many Flowstars mention how much they enjoyed travelling for work. We’ve been lucky – Flowstars have crossed the globe in the name of client service, from Algeria to the United States and from Ghana to Lesotho.

Here’s what our CEO, Tara Turkington, has to say about 2025: “It’s been a milestone year for us, in which we celebrated Flow’s 20th anniversary. While we’re a far cry from the shoestring operation we started out as, in many ways we’re still the same: we have the same campaigning spirit, the same people focus and the same ethos of doing work we love with people we like – and helping to make the world a better place.”

Through our clients, many of whom are development organisations, such as UNICEF, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) – Germany’s international development agency – and the African Union (AU), we have collaborated on projects that promote education, cross-border African trade, climate resilience and more.

“I love working with a bunch of fabulous Flowstars – more than half the company has been with us for over five years, and there is a brilliant energy,” says Flow MD Tiffany Turkington-Palmer. “It’s a huge honour to work with the likes of the United Nations, European Union, GIZ, the Women Presidents Organization (WPO) and so many others, often doing work that makes a positive difference in the world.

The year began with a bang. Flow won Africa Agency of the Year at the global Indie Awards, and our leaders, sisters Tara and Tiffany, won the Indie Legend award. The Indie Awards are awarded annually by thenetworkone, a global independent marketing and communications agency network comprising 1 600 independent agencies.

To that, we added nine Assegai Awards, two Smarties Sub-Saharan Africa Awards and 25 PRISM Awards, including Best Large PR Consultancy for the third time in four years. We didn’t stop there!

We also earned seven New Generation Awards; the Africa Global Funds Service Providers Award for Best Marketing & Communications Consultancy, for the sixth time in seven years; and a gold SABRE Awards Africa award, bringing the total number of awards we’ve won as an agency to well over 200.

While winning agency of the year “all the times we did” was one of PR head Caroline Smith’s highlights, the others she lists sum up Flow: travelling to Algeria with CTO Richard Frank, and “lovely new clients, lovely old clients and lovely people I work with”.

Caroline and Richard went to Algeria in June to take part in meetings and workshops ahead of implementing a communications strategy for Afripol, the AU’s official organisation for promoting police cooperation among its member states. We also designed a new website for Afripol.

Work travel was also a highlight for Flow’s co-head of project management Gail Tanner, who travelled with Tara and project manager Nicky Whall to the annual WPO Entrepreneurial Excellence Forum in San Antonio, Texas, and to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for a joint GIZ-AU programme.

“It’s so wonderful meeting clients in person and experiencing a totally new culture. Looking forward to more adventures in 2026!” says Gail.

Nicky also mentions the San Antonio trip as a highlight of her year. “It is always a privilege to travel abroad, but when you get to go somewhere you’ve never been, with special work colleagues, and get to spend time with clients you love working with, it’s a real bonus. Attending the forum is always incredible because the event brings together a collection of interesting and successful women from all over the world,” she says.

Flow content producer Thelma Ngoma-Mavhunga and Sarah-Jane Viljoen, co-head of project management, travelled to Accra, Ghana, with the Better Than Cash Alliance, a United Nations-based partnership that helps countries transition from cash to digital payments, to see the real-life benefits that financial inclusion brings.

“It was my first time travelling in West Africa and we got to see so much in five days. We visited cocoa farms, tried different foods and got to make our own chocolate,” says Thelma.

Thelma also joined Tiffany, Caroline, senior communications specialist Thrishni Subramoney and project manager Kneo Mokgopa in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, for the u’GOOD Annual Conference 2025 – a four-day gathering that brought together researchers, funders and young leaders from across the Global South to spotlight efforts to advance youth well-being.

Account director Ayanda Siswana and our head of social media, Mili Sitshwele, travelled to Angola for the AU Commission and AU Development Agency to help present the III Financing Summit for Africa’s Infrastructure Development, which ended with investors committing US$18-billion to developing African infrastructure.

Developer Deon Takpuie listed being voted Flow’s Digital Star of the Year as one of his highlights for 2025, along with creating a yet-to-be-released customer support voice bot for one of our clients.

“The fact that you can speak to a bot like a real human and it can give you human-level customer support is great,” he says, adding that he really appreciates that “Flow is a company where you are valued and not just a number”.

Senior UX/UI designer Lizette Sutherland mentions designing a coffee-table book for the Imbumba Foundation/Trek4Mandela on conquering Mount Kilimanjaro to raise funds for the Caring4Girls project and to commemorate 30 years of democracy in South Africa, among many highlights.

Thelma was thrilled to be invited to speak about how African brands can and should remain authentic in an AI-infused world, at the Marketing, Advancement and Communication in Education conference in Johannesburg, along with Richard, who tackled the differences between generative engine optimisation, which prepares content for AI search tools, and search engine optimisation, better known as SEO.

Meanwhile, senior account director and strategist Allison MacDonald described 2025 as “a fantastic sales year for me” and listed work for the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, Sizekhaya Holdings and the pharmaceutical product Amuco as highlights.

Flow worked on several massive websites this year, including for NGO Gender Links and – a highlight for developer Felix Mensah – visa assistance company Travelisa. “It was a challenging project, really two projects in one … We sailed through it and ensured that the client got what they wanted,” says Felix.

Senior UX/UI designer Cara Wares says she and the rest of Flow’s design team spent a lot of the year adapting and testing many new AI tools and integrating them into their workflows and processes. “It’s been a productive, eventful and busy year for the design team. Teamwork has kept us going – supporting each other, sharing ideas and backing each other up – and achieving many awards for our creative standout and conceptual design work made it all worthwhile,” she says.

Account director Daya Coetzee says winning a silver PRISM Award for a long-term digital reputation management project to reframe the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust’s (OMT) philanthropy campaign was a highlight, “along with getting three OMT opinion pieces published in Daily Maverick and shooting the lights out with their LinkedIn statistics”.

She was also thrilled to have ensured that two opinion pieces by the FluidRock Governance Group were published in Business Day, and to have secured the group several broadcast interviews, including on 702’s The MoneyShow, Midday@Moneyweb and Channel Africa.

We have also welcomed many younger Flowstars in the past few years, including Kamogelo Seperepere, who says that “the absolute highlight for me this year was successfully building and launching my first complete site on Craft CMS”.

The world is ever-changing and one of our longest-serving Flowstars, business developer Roy Barford, mentions this in his set of highlights: “From a business development perspective, there have been many highlights in 2025, despite challenges caused by global economics and politics.

“If I had to choose one highlight from this year, it would be the appointment to work with a major destination management company to launch a new luxury brand, which is something I’m really excited about for 2026. This is an incredible opportunity to promote Africa and hopefully create and sustain jobs.”

But, in the end, almost every Flowstar mentions collaborating with colleagues as a highlight, a sentiment perhaps best exemplified by web developer Fabio de Abreu, who says: “My highlight for 2025 was turning 40 in May. My wife threw me a surprise birthday party, which was made even more special by the attendance of some Flowstars.”