Selected work
Internal & employee communications
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.
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 calendars for the CEO, HR, IT, Safety, and Finance, identifying and defining key messages for internal teams. Expanded touchpoints and rebuilt the intranet to better serve the needs of a growing team.
Result: 60% growth in internal comms volume and a 16% increase in intranet engagement; teams better informed and aligned around company initiatives.
Building the internal voice: executive messaging & style guide
Challenge: No shared standards for internal communications at a company led to a lack of consistency and uncertainty around employee messaging. Also, a CEO transition required finding and defining a new CEO voice.
Approach: Reviewed company brand guide and existing content, while also interviewing cross-functional stakeholders to gather required input. 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: A style guide that gave every team a consistent, on-brand voice to write from while cutting down on repeat questions to the marketing group. I also documented a distinct voice for the incoming CEO, setting it apart from their predecessor so their own vision came through in every message.
Public engagement & media
Executing a 12-hour livestream that helped raise $175K
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: Produced and promoted a full 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 worked with team members in every department to brainstorm content ideas and worked with them to bring their visions to life, coaching them through scripts, 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 this one-day fundraising campaign and surpassed our original goal. 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 a yearly calendar to capture 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. Defined the cadence in the types of content shared to ensure we balanced the fun and educational with the funding requests. Tracked metrics each step of the way to measure and adjust 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: Interviewed legal and program experts and studied federal guidelines and shared resources to translate the policy and technical detail into a series of timely, clearly instructive articles. Wrote in collaboration with our internal experts and positioned them as the authors and experts for hire.
Result: The articles and related social posts were used by internal teams to solicit their services and drove additional consulting inquiries.