Produced Successful Press Conference for 50 Attendees

Host & Co-Producer of 5-Star Nuclear Waste Podcast

In 2020, in my second week as Communications Manager at Deep Isolation, I took over the design, launch, production, and hosting of brand-agnostic nuclear waste podcast, something that didn’t yet exist in our industry and a somewhat tall order given that I was new to nuclear waste and to podcasting.

But I dove in headfirst, trusting that my journalism background would provide me with the necessary skills to find interview subjects, conduct research and successfully complete video and audio interviews.

I helped lead the design process and developed the production workflow, and ended up posting 21 interviews and three highlight reels. The series earned a 5-star rating on Apple, and was named one of the “5 Best Nuclear Energy” podcasts to listen to in 2024 by FeedSpot.

Built Grassroots Public Campaign With Influencer Support

One of our challenges at Deep Isolation was to inspire the public to learn about — and care about — the nuclear waste issue.

So I led an effort that united a small internal team at Deep Isolation to design a brand-agnostic Solve Nuclear Waste campaign that we hoped could eventually become a platform with which to educate and influence decision-makers.

I managed an external PR agency that helped us identify target personas and conduct a nationally representative poll and then designed messaging for the campaign website and social media to appeal to these specific demographic groups. We assembled an external focus group of nuclear industry stakeholders and influencers to ensure our objectives were on track, and we tapped this focus group later to help promote our efforts.

I led the webpage design, launched two social media channels, and ran a paid Twitter campaign to A/B test messages with various personas.

The campaign test was quite successful, based on the social media ad metrics. Our Gen Z audience ads earned 32K impressions, and our average engagement rate on Twitter was double the average. Our Facebook ad had a 19 percent engagement rate.

Managing a Strong Comms Platform at Deep Isolation

As Deep Isolation’s Communications Manager, I managed the company’s media relations efforts, from building contact lists and monitoring mentions to writing press releases and blogs, pitching media and influencers, handling incoming media interview requests, and prepping staff for interviews. As part of this role, I established the company’s first internal social media guidelines and crisis and reputation management protocols and helped train team members on best practices. My last year there was our best year for media exposure, with news and social mentions up 157 percent YoY and total potential reach up 311 percent.

Thought leadership

I worked directly with Deep Isolation’s CEO developing her brand voice, including writing scripts for interviews and videos (some results shown here), prepping her for public appearances, and managing her Twitter and LinkedIn channels. I particularly enjoyed helping her develop a more personal voice, which you can see in this Twitter thread, which also includes a series of graphics I designed with Canva to illustrate her story.

Influencer Collaboration Yields Viral Nuclear Waste Video

Of course, metrics are important for measuring program successes. In 2022 Deep Isolation received 1,690 media mentions, up 156 percent YoY, with a total potential news reach of 897M, up 311 percent. Top mainstream media mentions include The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Associated Press, CNBC, Forbes and a viral YouTube video (see above) with 3.4M views. (Links to top articles can be found on my media page.)

Improving Email Newsletter Campaign Marketing Metrics

I took over the production of Deep Isolation’s email newsletter in 2020, and by updating its design, applying industry best practices, and producing great content, we saw significant improvements to our metrics, particularly the open rate, which at 40 percent is nearly double the average performance for marketing emails. (See graphic below)

More recently, the Zeno Power email marketing program that I founded, designed, and currently manage, has an average open rate of 64 percent. In my current role at Richmondside, my weekly email newsletter enjoys a 60% open rate.

Solar Roadshow: 40-Foot Trailer, 14 Cities Coast-to-Coast

I worked closely with SunPower’s Channel Training Director to support the SunPower Equinox Roadshow, project managing two customer-centric stops on the tour and creating photos, a blog, videos and 80 social posts over two months.

This project had both internal and external comms components and included a private Facebook Group I used to help build community among our employees and drive event attendance.

I was on scene at three of the shows gathering and posting content live, and I trained the truck crew members on how to tell their stories on social.

Reputation Management

In addition to being SunPower’s first and sole Social Media Manager and first Blog Editor, I founded our company’s first online review site reputation management program. My ability to creatively motivate and cross-collaborate with customer service teams that had never worked closely with marketing raised our average star rating from 2.6 to 4.0 in 10 months. I created and delivered training materials on how to solicit reviews from happy customers and designed a spiff program to reward the teams. I also designed a problem-resolution workflow to more quickly resolve urgent social media customer care cases so we could convert negative reviews into positives. My efforts twice earned me SunPower’s most prestigious internal employee award, the peer-nominated Prism honor.

YouTube Content Audit Optimizes Channel for Search

I worked hand-in-hand with an outside vendor to overhaul SunPower’s outdated YouTube channel and better optimize it for increased visibility. This included creating new playlists, improving video descriptions and keywords, identifying outdated content, and project managing the creation of new videos. One video, Solar Pros & Cons, which I designed and wrote the script for, had 21,000 organic views, second among all YouTube videos competing for this popular search term in the solar energy space. This post was an extension of my overarching social strategy that identified B2B & B2C content gaps and filled them by telling SEO-motivated stories via the blog, video and social. The companion Solar Pros & Cons blog post had 16,000 page views, our 7th most popular post.

Introduced Influencer Marketing to SunPower

My colleagues and I identified a key opportunity to test influencer marketing at SunPower. After attending a day-long influencer marketing certification by the Association of National Advertisers I helped design and launch our first influencer activation, an in-kind donation of a home solar system to award-winning Los Angeles architect Dan Brunn, who was building a unique green home called Bridge House, named a Dwell magazine home of the year. The relationship included social media and blog posts, promotional mentions at industry conferences, videos, a Satellite Media Tour to promote the finished project to national TV and radio outlets and opportunities for networking events at the home.

Social Media Marketing Training to Drive Revenue for Digital News Company

Six-Month Workshop Engaged More Than 500 West Coast Business Owners

In 2012 I worked with former West Coast Patch Publisher Brian Snider to create a business marketing event to connect local businesses with the Patch sales/marketing team and increase community engagement on Patch. The Main Street U project brought workshops to 560 small business owners in 19 Patch towns in California and Washington.

We realized that many business owners are novices in the social media revolution and are eager to improve their skills. The concept of communicating with their clients via social media or custom content is foreign to them. They were eager to sign up for workshops, participated actively, and wanted more sessions, including more detailed and longer classes.

Our custom two-hour workshop received rave reviews, with one participant exclaiming that he learned more from us than he did at a similar Google workshop! (Watch this video to see what business owners had to say about Main Street U.)

Click above to watch a video about our marketing program that is credited with driving one of our region’s most lucrative advertising contracts.

Empowering Women Returning to the Workforce

I harnessed the power of Patch to help market a new online business. Our efforts landed us on a local TV news show.

Patch and What's for Work? created the Patch 100, an initiative to help women returning to the workforce through a series of workshops about the importance of building an online employment profile and engaging in online career forums and other community websites.

I joined What's for Work CEO Teri Hockett in planning and delivering the workshops, which resulted in more than 120 job seekers signing up for What's for Work services.

One Team One Goal: A Cross-Department Initiative

A sales-editorial marking collaboration that created custom content to increase revenue and client retention. 

In 2013 Patch Senior Advertising Manager Aric Martinez, one of the top five salespeople at Patch nationally, and I pioneered a sales approach designed to increase revenue and retain key clients. Such an approach had not been tried at Patch so we were at the forefront of our company in showing such initiative. 

By merging the editorial and sales/marketing mission into one package, we were able to present to clients products that specifically met their needs for custom content, social media coaching and blogging advice. 

Clients included a major financial company, banks, hospitals and educational institutions, and our efforts resulted in increased revenue and longer contracts.

Helped Pilot Survey Program for Robert Half International

In late 2014 the Online Content Marketing team at Robert Half International supported the development of a new content creation program through TechValidate in an effort to offer our readership more credible data via new delivery channels such as infographics and client testimonials. This solution also offered us a more timely way of gathering information about the finance and accounting industry's highly seasonal business interests. 

For my pilot program, we tested surveying Robert Half Finance and Accounting customers about tax season and year-end accounting challenges. Here's a sample of what was published.