Selected work

Guiding 1,400 employees through a company bankruptcy

Challenge: Staff at a telecommunications company faced uncertainty about their jobs during a protracted bankruptcy and sale process.

Approach: Partnered with crisis communications teams, executive leadership, and legal teams to write transparent yet compassionate messaging on behalf of the CEO and HR teams throughout the transition. Combined the use of company newsletters, direct executive messaging, press releases, and intranet resources to share information and solicit feedback.

Result: Kept internal teams informed while protecting sensitive legal information through the most volatile stretch the company faced. Provided timely updates to all teams, including collecting questions and concerns from employees in order to get accurate responses from leadership.

Internal & employee communications

Scaling internal comms as the workforce doubled (700 → 1,400 employees) in under 3 years

Challenge: A fast-growing organization with team members located nationwide was outpacing their previous and limited internal communications capabilities, leaving many employees in the dark about company goals, initiatives, and critical updates.

Approach: Built and ran new communications plans for the CEO, HR, IT, Safety, and Finance, identifying and defining key messages for internal departments. Identified and collaborated with stakeholders on a regular basis to ensure proactive messaging. Rebuilt the intranet to better serve the needs of a growing company.

Result: 60% growth in internal comms volume and a 16% increase in intranet engagement; internal teams better informed and aligned around company initiatives.

Building the internal voice: executive messaging & style guide

Challenge: With shared standards for internal communications, company messaging lacked consistency and legitimacy. Also, a CEO transition required finding and defining a new CEO voice.

Approach: Reviewed company brand guide and existing content, while gathering input from cross-functional stakeholders. Created a written style guide custom to the company and built branded internal templates for consistency. Defined and documented the CEO's voice and ghost-wrote on their behalf.

Result: The defined style guide helped guide other departments when creating content and made building messaging easier and more consistent. These resources also cut down on repeat questions to the marketing and communications department. Identifying the incoming CEO’s voice helped humanize and build trust with employees, ensuring their unique vision came through in each message written on their behalf.

Public engagement & media

Executing a 12-hour livestream for biggest fundraising day to date

Challenge: A nonprofit was looking for a creative and novel way to raise awareness of their annual fundraising campaign to ensure they hit their funding goal. Their secondary goal was to help staff and volunteers understand their role in donor relations and the importance of fundraising in their daily lives.

Approach: Designed, produced, and promoted a 12-hour fundraising livestream event, which included defining the run of show, creating and orchestrating video content, marketing to the public, and managing the behind-the-scenes technology. I coached employees from each department to identify content ideas and helped them bring their visions to life through script writing, videography, and editing. I also engaged with volunteers, our board of directors, and major donors to get them involved in the ideation and execution of content.

Result: Helped raise $175K during the nonprofits biggest and most important fundraising campaign of the year - surpassed original goal and raised more than any previous campaign to date. Additionally, we created an event that meaningfully involved the entire staff, board, and volunteers in the fundraising process.

Creating a scientific resource cited by the New York Times

Challenge: At the onset of the highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI, or bird flu) epidemic, rising public and commercial concerns created uncertainty about the disease and the actions to take to protect wildlife and poultry.

Approach: On behalf of a recognized leader in bird health and wildlife rehab, I proactively built a clear, science-grounded digital resource, pairing real data with plain language, for the media to reference and for the public and partner organizations to use in making decisions.

Result: Became a trusted, widely referenced source for the public and the press. Colleague organizations referenced our written recommendations to their teams for proper biohazard protocol and the public turned to us for answers around their own behavior. Multiple press organizations referenced our resource and used our provided images in stories written about the bird flu outbreak, including the New York Times. Read the NYT story.

Make the complex clear

Authoring an environmental newsletter with a 12k+ readership

Challenge: How to motivate an audience to financially support an organization and change behaviors to help the environment, while also providing scientifically accurate and educational material for all ages and experiences.

Approach: Created an annual calendar to document and proactively plan for relevant seasonal changes and environmental trends, alongside events and donor campaigns. Worked alongside and interviewed the on-the-ground teams to capture stories in the moment and ensure a steady stream of relevant and engaging content. Balanced the educational and fun content with donor requests to keep readers engaged. Tracked metrics such as unsubscribes, open rates, click through rates, and donations each step of the way to measure and adjust strategy as needed.

Result: Grew to a readership of 12,000 and helped our team become the top-performing department for donations at the University of Minnesota’s College of Veterinary Medicine. Readership included partner organizations, media figures, public school educators, birders, environmentalists, donors, and the general public.

Making sense of a complex federal grant program

Challenge: States and municipalities needed help understanding a dense, ever-changing, federally funded broadband program in order to obtain grants for their own initiatives.

Approach: Proactively created a series of timely instructive articles to explain complex changes to a federal grant program as they happened. Synthesized information from interviews with legal and program experts, along with publicized grant guidelines, to create actionable white papers.

Result: The articles and related social posts were used by internal teams to solicit their services online and in person, driving additional qualified leads.