Marketing & Creative Ops

Opportunity: StoryCorps needed to rebrand its for-hire content development division, "StoryCorps Custom Services," with a new name and positioning that would unlock new revenue opportunities, elevate its branded content services, and more clearly differentiate its work from StoryCorps' NPR editorial content. At the same time, the division needed to refine its its creative briefing procedures to effectively scale and ensure the team could deliver against growing demand from higher profile partners.
Task: Develop and finalize a new brand, roll it out to in-progress and potential clients, and refine briefing practices to better define (and more swiftly achieve) client storytelling objectives.
Action: I collaborated with marketing & strategic partnerships leadership to develop the visual identity, messaging framework, website presence, and SEO strategy for an all-new "StoryCorps Studios" brand. I oversaw the rollout of branded pitch and proposal decks for our sales activities, supervised the integration of the new branding into deliverables for ongoing partners, and directed creation of comprehensive parter-facing Brand and Crediting Guidelines for consistent and accurate branding usage. Concurrently, I enhanced the department’s Visioning Session framework with new clients to incorporate deeper inquiries into partners' brand objectives and perceived challenges. I revised the Creative Brief template to articulate a high-level storytelling goal that synthesized key insights and more concretely defined the project's themes, participant profiles, and objectives. This goal statement served as a guiding reference for all team members involved in story edits. I also introduced a "Challenges and Recommendations" section into the brief where Account Managers provided actionable strategies to address barriers identified during Visioning Sessions. Finally, I implemented a partnership reflection process with clients, conducting interviews at various project milestones to record their assessment of the partnership’s value and overall goal achievement.
Result: Following the launch of the StoryCorps Studios brand, the division secured some of its largest contracts to date, including ambitious production projects for the City of San Diego and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The rebrand also expanded the types of stories the division could tell, leading to high-profile collaborations with entertainment company Lionsgate and former Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards, where we were able to delve more deeply into sensitive and previously underrepresented topics, such as reproductive rights and abortion access. Concurrently, the refinements in the creative briefing process led to substantial improvements in project workflow. By establishing clearer storytelling objectives and enhancing editorial alignment from the outset, the team reduced the number of feedback rounds across all projects. As a result, every project in the first year of implementation was completed on or ahead of schedule. In post-project reflection sessions, clients consistently rated the team 5/5 in achieving the storytelling goals set at the beginning of their projects.

Opportunity: Entering its 13th year, the StoryCorps Mobile Tour wanted to increase participant donations, find fresh new ways to drive engagement on the ground, and better showcase the value of our impact both to radio station partners (whose collaboration is critical for the Tour and other StoryCorps programs) and to funders, like longtime primary funder, CPB.
Task: Design and operationalize new engagement strategies that the very small Road Team - current and future - could sustainably execute to deepen and shine light on the relationships between StoryCorps, Tour participants, and station partners.
Action: We trained the team on how to make the donation ask, introduced monthly tracking and recognition of top performers, and launched an annual limited-edition StoryCorps Mobile Tour Poster that we offered as a premium gift to incentivize donors, additionally selling posters at Tour events and in StoryCorps’ online store to open up new revenue streams. We also launched a cohesive social media strategy: inviting participants to snap and share photos of themselves with our new #StoryCorpsMobileTour tag and running monthly StoryCorps Instagram account takeovers with participant portraits, standout quotes, and other Tour Stop highlights. We tagged relevant community and station partners, sponsors, participants, other brand ambassadors to encourage them to re-post. Finally, we transformed the Tour’s approach to promotion and engagement for the culminating Listening Events that station partners organized to wrap their Tour Stops. My team launched the practice of providing physical as well as RSVP-enabled digital invitations to participants to boost, project and measure attendance. We also added new interactive components to the event experience and — by launching the new practice of producing and presenting a Community Voices Montage as the event’s “grand finale”— we incorporated exponentially more, and more diversified, local voices into the event Run of Show itself.
Result: My team generated an average 300% increase in monthly donations compared to the previous year. The social media strategy opened up unprecedented access to an organic, ongoing flow of authentic, user-generated content that StoryCorps and station partners were able to share across channels while thanking and crediting key sponsors. Similarly StoryCorps' CPB relationship manager was empowered to include compelling imagery in grant reports and updates to CPB, generating renewed enthusiasm and commitment around the Tour. The social strategy we pioneered has scaled successfully across different teams and years and continues to propel brand and impact visibility for the Mobile Tour today, as it prepares to enter its 20th anniversary year in 2025. The Tour also continues to use our template for Listening Events, which more than doubled average event attendance and provides stations with valuable 'ready-to-use' local content—like the Community Voices Montages—that they share out to their larger audiences to strengthen connections to listeners and funders. The value to our 2018-2019 Tour partners also became clear as many stations chose to deepen their relationships with StoryCorps by opting/applying to participate in more extended programs such as StoryCorps’ Military Voices Initiative and the year-long One Small Step Radio Station Hubs program in subsequent years.

Opportunity: ePals (re-branded as Cricket Media in 2011) needed to merge its legacy global learning social network site with its new enterprise-grade collaboration platform for K-12 schools and districts, which offered significantly enhanced capabilities for engaging with media-rich content and projects. This integration aimed to strengthen the company’s value proposition by consolidating the best elements of its offerings and paving the way for the rollout of new content, including a 40-year catalog of children’s educational magazines and publications from Cricket Magazine, which ePals was set to acquire in 2011.
Task: Coordinate communications for both B2B and D2C users, generate excitement about the all-new media-rich platform, and develop support content to ensure a smooth transition for all users.
Action: I tailored launch communications for diverse audiences, developing email campaigns that achieved over 20% open rates and 15% click-through rates, as well as creating B2B and D2C collateral, updated sales packets for partner sales forces at Microsoft and Dell, and video tutorial support resources for partners and users. I collaborated with Cricket Media, as well as the Smithsonian Institution, Cirque du Soleil, and Educurious to feature special content from their projects on our website at launch and coordinated co-marketing campaigns to expand the reach of our promotion. Additionally, I crafted case studies that celebrated the work of our most active educators on the global learning network site. The centerpiece of the launch was our presence in a 20x20 booth and cocktail hour event sponsorship at the ISTE conference in San Diego, where we co-presented with our partners and highlighted featured educators who served as ambassadors, sharing their experiences with attendees.
Result: The outreach, co-marketing campaigns, and impactful presence at industry events generated the highest spike in registrations for the site up to that point. This momentum led to a positive response from both B2B and D2C audiences, setting the stage for the subsequent rollout of additional Cricket Media content and the newly-merged Cricket and ePals IPO within the year.

Opportunity: iSkoot, offering a solution that could bring VoIP calling and other Internet services to mass-market handsets in the pre/proto-smartphone era, needed to establish market presence.
Task: Build a D2C user base to beta test and refine the product, market it as a white-label solution to mobile carriers, secure major partnerships to drive adoption, and position the company for acquisition.
Action: I developed and maintained iSkoot’s website presence, blog and user support resources, and supported the press/digital marketing strategy to attract beta testers. As the company shifted into B2B, I collaborated with the Head of Marketing to develop the brand’s identity, establish its value proposition, generate B2B marketing collateral, showcase our solution at industry events, secure favorable press coverage, execute mobile ad campaigns (including achieving a $1.50 CPA) and earn the company industry awards/shortlist recognition. As iSkoot closed deals with carriers like AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and others, I developed co-branded branded copy and creative for partners’ marketing channels, including in-store, online, TV, and app store promotions, and led support, focus group testing, and communications directly with users, ultimately helping drive adoption to over 1 million monthly uniques.
Result: Qualcomm Innovation Center, which focuses on integrating innovative software solutions into Fortune 500 company Qualcomm’s technologies, bought iSkoot in 2010.