Reimagine Now

Public affairs · Advocacy · Political consulting

We change public opinion on issues that are hard to explain and easy to oppose.

Reimagine Now is a public affairs firm in Kuala Lumpur. We do the research that tells you where opinion actually sits, the strategy that decides what will move it, and the campaign that moves it. Most of what clients bring us is technical, politically awkward, or both.

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Undi18

We lowered the voting age by amending the Federal Constitution.

Malaysia’s voting age was set in the Federal Constitution, so changing it needed a two-thirds majority in both houses of Parliament. Our founders started Undi18 from the outside, with no budget, no party behind them and no institutional access, and spent three years building support across benches that agreed on very little else, until voting against it became the harder position.

The bill passed 211 to nil. It is the first bill in Malaysia’s history to clear both houses of Parliament unanimously, and it put 7.8 million more Malaysians on the electoral roll.

We started Reimagine Now to do the same thing for clients.

What we do

We do our own research, write our own strategy, and run our own campaigns.

When the people running the campaign are the same people who did the polling, you find out within days that a message is not landing, and you change it that week instead of at the next quarterly review.

Sentiment analysis

We establish where opinion sits, who holds it and how hard they hold it, before anyone writes a word.

  • Social listeningWe track Facebook, X, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, forums, blogs and online news for your issue, with an alert threshold set so you hear about a problem while it is still small enough to handle.
  • PollingOpinion surveys broken down by age, income, locality and region. This is usually where a client finds out that the issue they thought was national is confined to two states, or that the group opposing them is smaller than the noise suggests.
  • Issue impact analysisOur own scoring framework. It ranks every live issue by how far it has spread and how hard people are engaging with it, so you can tell which ones need answering and which will burn out on their own.

Strategy

We work out what to say, who needs to hear it, and who has to be brought along for any of it to hold.

  • Communications strategyWe settle four things in a fixed order: the image you are trying to hold, the narrative that carries it, the issues you will engage on, and the channels you will use. Campaigns drift when they are built in the wrong order.
  • Audience segmentationWho you are actually talking to, where they are, and which arguments move them. In practice this is almost always a smaller group than the client assumed.
  • Stakeholder managementWe engage the government and political stakeholders around your issue, both to find out what is actually happening inside and to move your position with the people who decide it.

Delivery

We run the campaign ourselves and stay on the account for as long as it runs.

  • Social media targetingPaid and organic, segmented down to constituency level where the issue calls for it.
  • Direct messagingSMS, WhatsApp and voice broadcast to a defined list, for the people who are never going to see your post.
  • Content developmentWritten and produced per channel, per audience and per language. A TikTok video and a Bahasa op-ed are not the same argument delivered twice.

Track record

What the work actually looks like.

Our client work is confidential, so these are written without names. What we can show you is how we read each problem and what we did about it.

Healthcare

The problem
A global pharmaceutical company needed a health ministry to put real money behind a disease that was serious, widespread and nowhere near the top of the political agenda.
The read
The ask was reasonable, but there was no version of the client making it directly that did not look like a company lobbying for its own market. Whatever the merits, that is the story that gets written.
The move
So we did not make the ask. We built a national youth programme around the disease and ran it as an open innovation challenge, which handed the ministry a platform it wanted to be seen on and a youth constituency it wanted to reach, and kept the client out of the framing.
The result
The ministry’s two most senior officials came in voluntarily, the disease moved up the agenda as a public health priority rather than an industry request, and the programme itself produced 50 trained ambassadors and 10 workable solutions.

Energy

The problem
A national energy liberalisation programme had to be explained to a public that did not want it, did not trust the pricing behind it and had no interest in the economics.
The read
Arguing the policy on its merits was a losing position, because the public was not arguing about the policy. They were reacting to a price they had no say in setting, and explanation does not answer a grievance about not being consulted.
The move
We built a standing platform for young people to take part in energy and electricity policy, and brought the delivering agencies into it directly, so the programme had somewhere to be discussed rather than only announced.
The result
The argument moved from price to participation, a programme with no public constituency ended up with one, and the platform’s own programmes ran 120 per cent above their engagement target.

The team

You will be working with the three of us directly.

Tharma Pillai

Tharma Pillai

Managing Director

Tharma co-founded Undi18 and led the advocacy that turned it from a student campaign into a constitutional amendment, which took three years of building agreement between parties that agreed on very little else. He runs the political side of client accounts, which usually means the arguments that have to be won in private before anything is said in public.

  • Forbes 30 Under 30
  • Tatler Asia’s Most Influential
  • Gen T Leaders of Tomorrow
  • Queen’s Commonwealth Trust
  • Prestige Malaysia 40 Under 40
  • Acumen Fellow
  • Bertha Challenge Fellow
  • National Youth Consultative Council
  • Senate Reform Committee
Qyira Yusri

Qyira Yusri

Executive Director

Qyira co-founded Undi18 and ran it alongside Tharma through to the amendment. She has since advised on youth policy at European Commission level, and she leads outreach and coalition building on client accounts.

  • Forbes 30 Under 30
  • Prestige Malaysia 40 Under 40
  • Special Advisor on Youth to the EU Commissioner for International Partnerships
  • CrossCulture Programme Fellow, ifa
Chan Zhe Sheng

Chan Zhe Sheng

Executive Director

Chan came out of PEMANDU, the delivery unit inside the Prime Minister’s Department, where the job was making government programmes happen after they had been announced. He has since designed and run public policy programmes in Germany, Oman, Pakistan and Lesotho, and he runs delivery and project management on client accounts.

  • Management Consultant, PEMANDU Associates
  • Analyst, PEMANDU
  • Perdana Fellow, Prime Minister’s Department

Contact

Tell us what you are trying to move.

Send us the issue, the deadline, and who has to say yes. We will tell you whether we think we can shift it and roughly what that takes, before you commit to anything.

Email

contact@reimaginenow.org

Office

Suite 10-01, Menara Centara
Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman
50100 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Company

Reimagine Now Sdn Bhd (1388075-V)