I build marketing that earns trust before it asks for anything.
Fifteen years across nonprofits, advocacy, and global brands — learning what it takes to earn attention, build trust, and move people to act.
What I Do Now
At Blue State, I direct media strategy for organizations trying to move the needle on issues that matter — the kind of issues where getting it wrong isn’t a missed quarter but a missed generation. Blue State is the purpose-driven agency born from Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign, now two decades and $2.5 billion in online revenue into building some of the most effective advocacy, fundraising, and engagement programs in the nonprofit sector.
My portfolio spans organizations working across medical research, global development, human rights, environmental policy, and reproductive justice. The common thread isn’t sector — it’s stakes. These are organizations where media strategy isn’t a line item. It’s the connective tissue between mission and impact.
I work with leadership to translate mission into media language: How do we earn attention in a crowded information environment? How do we spend strategically across channels and constituencies? How do we know if we’re actually building the constituency we need? These are the questions I wake up thinking about. And they’re rarely answered by the tools most teams default to — platform dashboards, last-click attribution, vanity reach numbers.
My approach starts with the outcome and works backward. If the goal is donor retention, I want to know what emotional journey a donor goes through between first gift and second gift — and where media can intervene to shorten or strengthen that journey. If the goal is awareness, I want to know awareness of what, specifically, among whom, and measured how. Vague goals produce vague work. Specific goals produce campaigns you can actually learn from.
The work spans strategy, account leadership, and narrative development. Some of my days are mapping audience journeys. Others are in strategy sessions shaping the story. The best ones are both. I’ve found that the strategists who can move between analytical rigor and creative intuition — who can build a media plan and also ask “but does this story actually land?” — are the ones who produce work that lasts.
What drew me to Blue State wasn’t the prestige — it was the thesis. The agency believes that when you combine rigorous strategy with authentic storytelling and genuine respect for your audience, you can move people at scale without manipulating them. That’s a bet I want to spend my career on.
The gap between what an organization measures and what actually matters is where most of the leverage lives.
How I Got Here
I started in media at VICE Media Group, a global operation reaching 350 million people monthly — a media company that had turned youth culture fluency into a platform for brands willing to earn credibility rather than buy reach. That taught me specificity. The audiences VICE reached weren’t monolithic “millennials” or “Gen Z.” They were subcultures with their own codes, their own skepticism, their own tests for whether you were real. You couldn’t fake it. You had to actually understand the room you were walking into.
As Director of Media Strategy, I led brand partnerships for clients including Chanel, Google, Microsoft, and Delta — developing campaign frameworks that translated cultural proximity into measurable business outcomes. When we pitched Chanel on an editorial-first content series through i-D Magazine, we weren’t selling impressions. We were selling cultural credibility with an audience brands couldn’t reach through traditional media.
That lesson — that specificity beats scale — shaped everything that came after.
From VICE, I moved into wellness and digital innovation at Thrive Global, Arianna Huffington’s behavior change platform. The company raised $130M and partnered with 200+ organizations to embed its Microsteps framework — small, science-backed behavior changes — into workplace culture at scale. That’s where I learned to think systemically about how people actually change. Not how we wish they’d change, or how a funnel diagram says they should change, but how the messy, nonlinear, deeply personal process of behavior change actually works.
Thrive’s mission was ambitious: change how people relate to technology, stress, and their own habits. The media strategy couldn’t just reach people — it had to meet them in the moments when change was possible, with messages that felt like permission rather than prescription.
I spent two years at The Trevor Project as VP of Marketing — the world’s largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ+ young people, operating 24/7 crisis services serving the 1.8 million LGBTQ+ youth who seriously consider suicide each year. I built the marketing function from the ground up in a nonprofit context. That’s where the discipline around proving impact crystallized.
The central insight was that prevention, not just intervention, could drive both mission impact and revenue. By repositioning Trevor around affirmation and joy, I created alignment that made it easier for brands to see themselves as partners in uplifting LGBTQ+ young lives. The repositioning generated $60M+ in charitable revenue, grew brand awareness by 40%, and built 80+ brand partnerships spanning entertainment, fashion, tech, and CPG.
What I’m proudest of from Trevor isn’t any single campaign. It’s that we built a marketing function that could prove its own value — one that connected brand positioning to revenue generation to mission impact in a way the board could see, stakeholders could trust, and the team could sustain.
The Ad Council taught me to think at national scale. The organization behind Smokey Bear, the Crash Test Dummies, and “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk” — eighty years of public service campaigns that shaped American behavior. With $1.8 billion in annual donated media, the Ad Council operates at a scale most marketers never encounter.
Campaigns run by committees, messages stress-tested across dozens of segments, trying to move millions of people on issues they’d rather not think about. That’s humbling work. It’s also where I learned that your best insights often come from the friction points — the places where a message doesn’t land for someone, because that’s where you’re not being specific enough. When a PSA about mental health falls flat with rural men over 50, that’s not a failure of the creative. It’s information about what that audience needs to hear differently. Every rejection is data.
The Philosophy
My work is built on something I call Emotional Precision: the conviction that the most effective marketing happens when you understand the specific emotional truth of your audience — and design campaigns that speak to it directly.
That sounds simple. It’s not.
Most marketing — including most nonprofit marketing — operates on assumptions about what audiences feel. We assume donors are motivated by guilt. We assume young people want to be inspired. We assume that if we tell people the facts, they’ll act rationally. These assumptions aren’t wrong, exactly. They’re just not specific enough. And in marketing, the difference between “roughly right” and “precisely right” is the difference between a campaign that gets attention and a campaign that changes behavior.
Emotional Precision means targeting moments, not demographics. It means understanding that a 28-year-old queer person in crisis and a 55-year-old donor writing a check are both experiencing specific emotional states — fear, hope, guilt, agency — and that your message either meets them in that state or it doesn’t. Demographics tell you who someone is. Emotional context tells you what they’re ready to hear.
You can’t count what didn’t happen. That means we have to get serious about understanding what we can observe: movement in perception, shifts in stated intent, access to resources, connections made. It means working backward from the outcome we need and defining what success looks like before we ever write a headline. Most teams build the campaign first and then figure out if it worked. That’s backward. If you don’t know what you’re trying to move, you can’t know if you moved it.
But rigor without insight is just spreadsheets. So the other half is listening — really listening — to what your audience already believes. Not through surveys or focus groups alone, but through the kinds of conversations that let you hear the texture of how people actually think about your issue. What metaphors do they use? What do they get wrong? What do they get right that surprises you? Then you build narratives that meet them where they are, that don’t ask them to make impossible leaps, that earn trust incrementally.
I’ve watched too many organizations try to skip the listening step. They have a message they want to deliver. They have data that supports it. They have a board that approved it. And they push it out into the world and wonder why it doesn’t land. It doesn’t land because they never asked whether their audience was ready to hear it. Readiness isn’t a given. It’s something you build — through specificity, through repetition, through trust earned over time.
Marketing is either moving people toward something better, or it’s noise. That’s the choice.
And the way you move people isn’t by being louder. It’s by being more specific — about who they are, what they need, and why they should trust you to help them get there.
The Method
I didn’t sit down one day and design a framework. These four pillars emerged in retrospect — patterns I noticed across fifteen years of campaigns, organizations, and the specific kinds of failure that teach you more than success ever does.
Each one came from a specific experience, a specific failure, or a specific insight that changed how I approached the work after it. They’re not proprietary — they’re just how I’ve learned to think.
Reading the Room
We spent months understanding not just who was watching, but why. What did they already believe? What were they willing to believe next? The teams that won were the teams that could answer those questions with precision — not “millennials care about authenticity” but “this specific audience segment in this specific city responds to this specific type of humor because it signals membership in a community they value.”
This isn’t just about demographics or psychographics. It’s about narrative position — where does your audience place themselves in the story of this issue? Are they the hero? The bystander? The skeptic? If you don’t know, you’re broadcasting. If you do know, you’re having a conversation.
Outcomes Over Impressions
We realized that vanity metrics — reach, impressions, clicks — don’t tell you whether you moved anyone. They tell you whether you got attention. Attention and movement are not the same thing.
This meant tracking not just awareness but belief change — did people believe Trevor was credible? Did they believe Trevor understood their experience? Did they believe reaching out was safe? Those beliefs are observable. And they’re predictive of the behaviors we actually cared about: calls to the crisis line, donations, volunteerism, advocacy.
Narrative as Strategy
At Thrive, we learned that behavior change doesn’t happen through information alone. It happens when people feel seen, when they see themselves in a story, when they believe a different future is possible for them specifically. Not for people in general. For them.
At Trevor, we didn’t just tell stories of survival. We told stories that positioned Trevor as the decision someone makes in their worst moment — the call you make, the text you send, the resource you turn to when everything else feels impossible. That required narrative precision: knowing exactly what doubt lived in a potential supporter’s mind, then building story that addressed it directly. Not around it. Through it.
Partnership as Multiplication
At the Ad Council, we worked through partnerships — with media companies, nonprofits, thought leaders, and each other. The partnerships weren’t transactional. They were multiplicative. We asked: What does this partner need? What do we need? Can we build something that serves both missions and reaches further than either of us could alone?
Trevor’s 80+ brand partnerships weren’t 80 logo placements. They were 80 organizations that believed in the mission enough to put resources behind it — and whose audiences trusted them enough to follow. When you flip from transaction to partnership, from extraction to multiplication, everything changes. The work gets bigger than any single organization. And that’s the point.
What Comes Next
I’m spending my time on three things right now.
The work at Blue State, which is as good as it gets if you want to think at scale about how media moves people toward causes that matter. Blue State has raised over $2.5 billion in online revenue and built advocacy programs for organizations like UNICEF, Amnesty International, the NAACP, Sierra Club, and AARP — the agency born from Obama’s first presidential campaign, now two decades into some of the most effective purpose-driven work in the sector. I get to work with organizations that are trying to solve real problems, with teams that care about rigor, and with budgets that let us test ideas rather than just hope they work.
Writing. I run a newsletter called The Dispatch where I think out loud about media, messaging, and the work of moving people. It’s where I process what I’m learning, test ideas before they’re fully formed, and have the kind of conversations that don’t fit neatly into a client presentation. Strategy, culture, AI, the evolving relationship between audiences and institutions — if it’s on my mind, it ends up in The Dispatch.
And speaking. Some of the best learning happens in rooms where people are trying to solve similar problems, and I’ve found that the act of articulating what you know — out loud, in front of people who will push back — is one of the most effective ways to sharpen your own thinking. I speak about nonprofit marketing, emotional precision in messaging, media strategy for mission-driven organizations, and building campaigns that aim to change behavior rather than just capture attention.
The most interesting work happens in the spaces between disciplines — between strategy and creative, between intuition and evidence, between what we know about audiences and what we’re willing to admit we don’t know.
I’ve spent fifteen years in those spaces, and I’m not looking back.
Let’s talk
Speaking engagements, collaborations, and conversations about purpose-driven marketing. If something here resonated, reach out.