Challenge: During Covid, CaringKind needed to 1) stay top of mind for stakeholders, and 2) communicate its new mission to potential stakeholders.
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Solution: CaringKind can't cure Alzheimer's disease. But it can turn bad situations into better situations. So, I created a 6-video social media campaign that starts with a bad situation and makes it better with CaringKind's help.

Challenge: CaringKind is the Heart of Alzheimer's Caregiving. But their newsletter didn't have any heart at all. The old covers featured meaningless vector graphics, and the inside was a wall of text. The old newsletter was 25 pages long and too expensive to print and mail to their constituents, so they sent it by email. And guess what? No one was opening it, let alone reading it. It cost a lot to produce but didn't produce any results.
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Solution: I underscored CaringKind's identity (personal, warm, and supportive) by placing clients on the cover (like the stars they are), and supporting those portraits with moving profiles. I also broke up all that text with engaging graphics and bite-sized articles that are easily scanned at a glance. Why? Because that's how people read newsletters. Reducing the newsletter to just four meaningful pages made it affordable to mail a hard copy to recent donors. And by including a reply envelope, the newsletter generated revenue that exceeded expenses. They stayed in touch with donors and made a profit. Win-win!

Challenge: CaringKind recruits amateur athletes who do fundraising for the organization. But with a new name and mission, CaringKind needed to make the case to potential athletes why they should join the CaringKind team. And it needed to reassure participants that they don't need to be professional athletes.

Solution: The best spokespeople for CaringKind's athletes program are the everyday athletes themselves. In their own words, athletes covered all the right points: why they run, who they run for, how exciting the events are, and how easy fundraising is. And, let's be real - who doesn't look good in traffic cone orange?

Challenge: CaringKind has been in the business of caregiving for 40 years. And their tech platforms were showing their age. All their platforms were between five and twenty years old. And they didn't connect to each other, requiring manual exports and imports each month. This cumbersome process was not only labor intensive, it caused significant data losses regarding donor information. (That's a fancy way of saying "death spiral.")

Solution: Too often, people turn to technology to make up for faulty business processes. But here, new tech was needed. I project-managed a complete overhaul of the client management system, donor management system, and the communications system. I implemented a Salesforce solution as the hub, with three specific integrations. As a result, data now flows across systems without manual entry, data isn't lost or duplicated, and staff can focus more on detailed donor and client support. Email open rates, click-thrus, and donations tripled, thousands of new stakeholders are being acquired and converted, and CaringKind is thriving.

Award! In 2021, the American Marketing Association recognized my achievements overhauling CaringKind's brand by naming me the Nonprofit Marketer of the Year. How cool is that?!

Challenge: CaringKind brings potential donors together to raise awareness and funds for Alzheimer's caregiving. To raise money, Walkers create a profile on a fundraising site and then send that link to friends and family. And guess what? It's technical. It's complicated. And there are bugs. And with no support staff to field calls from hundreds of walkers, how do they get support?

Solution: Prevent support calls in the first place by creating a very clear explainer video that walks Walkers through the process of creating and managing a page on the system. Screen recording a real-world test case makes the process very clear. Adding animation makes it interesting and fun.

Challenge: The FiFi Awards is known as the Oscars of the fragrance industry. Jane Lynch was once hired to emcee the event. And to do that, she needed some good jokes for an all-star audience.

Solution: With a partner, I wrote material for Jane that was re-printed in media outlets all over the country, including Vanity Fair, New York Times, Salon, Washington Post, and more. When the Sacramento Bee prints your jokes, you know you've made it. (That's me, on the left.)

And yes, Chaka Khan had a great time.