Online Portfolio

Here's a collection of some of my favorite professional marketing campaigns and writing samples, including several of my more recent projects at the City of Fort Worth and other nonprofits, and a selection of posts from The Modern Blog.

Highlights:

• STRATEGY: The City of Fort Worth Communications Handbook & Style Guide, which was the City of Fort Worth's very first branding guide and a strategic project that I developed every aspect of, from start to finish.

• WRITING: Internal Communications Highlights from the City of Fort Worth, which showcases my written ability to inspire people to care about anything – even government work.

• SOCIAL MEDIA: 2013 North Texas Day of Giving Campaign for BRIT, a Facebook-only campaign which I developed and executed with no budget whatsoever, that went on to raise $35,000 during the North Texas Day of Giving – more money than any other institution in the Cultural District that year.

• GRAPHICS: The 2019 Business Plan Competition, for which I designed the primary marketing image and oversaw all elements of the communications campaign, which resulted in a record number of applicants and two sold-out Eventbrite events for Pitch Night and the Finale.

Marketing PROJECTS,
2013-PRESENT

COVID-19 MARKETING & COMMUNICATIONS SUPPORT

The COVID-19 pandemic was an interesting time to work in government communications. In addition to providing the initial strategy and content updates for the COVID-19 webpages during the shutdown, and overseeing internal communications during the pandemic, my main focus was on Economic Development marketing and communications as the department scrambled to provide assistance to Fort Worth’s small business community.

This involved the creation of (and many updates to) a variety of COVID-19 business resources pages, and a lot of cross promotion with the city’s partners at the Chamber of Commerce, Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Metropolitan Black Chamber of Commerce, Visit Fort Worth, and others.

But it also involved a few major campaigns, including:

• Preserve the Fort Small Business Grants: When Fort Worth received its federal funding from the CARES Act, $10 million was set aside to support the city’s small businesses. Half of that funding was earmarked for minority-owned businesses and businesses in low-to-moderate income areas. Since the clock was ticking, I singlehandedly pulled the campaign together in about a week following the program’s approval by the city council. The campaign involved re-writing the eligibility/requirement text so it was easy to understand, compiling an FAQ for business owners, coordinating translations of all collateral into two additional languages, producing all of the graphics, running the social media and email newsletter campaign (including paid Facebook ads), and creating/updating the landing page for the Preserve the Fort page on the city’s website.
  

  Highlights:

  • The first round of Preserve the Fort grants was considered a success, having provided more than $6.5 million in funding to 882 local businesses. (There was almost 1,400 total applications.)

  • We hit our target audience of small “Mom & Pop” locations and microbusinesses, as a total of 95% of the businesses who applied had fewer than 25 employees.

  • More than $4.3 million was distributed to minority-owned businesses and businesses in the city’s targeted neighborhoods, with a good distribution across the city and across different minority groups.

  • The first round of funding was so successful in reaching our target audiences that leadership was able to pivot some of the focus areas for the second round of funding to incorporate nonprofits, bars and music venues, and slightly larger businesses.

• Business Resiliency Microloan Program: This was the city’s first small business support initiative during the pandemic, and while the application was hosted on the PeopleFund website, I oversaw the entire marketing campaign, from graphics to written content to social media support.

• COVID-19 Business Surveys: I worked with the Economic Development team to compile two different business surveys — one launched within a week of the shutdown, and another launched as businesses began to reopen — to help identify stress points, major concerns, staffing fluctuations, and which industries were being hit the hardest/unable to adapt the fastest. The first survey generated over 1,000 responses, and helped guide the department’s priorities and resources during the initial response to the pandemic.

CAMPAIGN COLLATERAL:

• Preserve the Fort Small Business Grants - Press Release (May 26, 2020)

• Preserve the Fort Small Business Grants - Social media messaging

• Preserve the Fort Small Business Grants - Leadership Talking Points

• Preserve the Fort Small Business Grants - Frequently Asked Questions (Also translated into Spanish and Vietnamese)

• Business Resiliency Microloan Program - Press Release/City News article (April 15, 2020)

• COVID-19 Follow-Up Business Survey - Press Release/City News article (April 30, 2020)

2020 MARKETING MILESTONE FOR CITY OF FORT WORTH COMMUNITY CENTERS

This wasn’t so much a single project, as it was an opportunity to reflect on five long years of systematically building, tweaking, and experimenting with marketing and communications efforts for the city’s 21 community centers. Marketing for the centers was truly “the wild west” when I first arrived, and other employees before me had attempted to come up with a workable system. None had yet succeeded.

But thanks to the patience/collaboration of Whitney Rodriguez, my liaison in the Park & Recreation Department, the past few years of effort has resulted in some pretty astonishing things — with me handling the creative, and her getting department buy-in.

Highlights:

• Doing more with less: When compared to the City of Arlington Park & Recreation Department (the local standard in Park & Rec Departments), Fort Worth has four times the number of facilities and 1/4 of the staff resources that Arlington does. In spite of this, Whitney and I are still able to provide the same quality and/or superior service in terms of materials (quarterly Recreation Catalog, fliers, general marketing promotion, etc.) to the Fort Worth community centers as Arlington does for theirs.

• Simplifying through automation: Our ability to provide this kind of service to the centers is partially due to a semi-automated intake form that I created, which standardized all flier/Facebook image requests from the centers and populated them according to a pre-set template in Basecamp, our project management system. Using this templated intake form, I was able to provide marketing support for more than 424 community center requests in FY2019 alone. (NOTE: When taking into account the workload from the centers, as well as my other two departments — Economic Development and Library — I personally coordinated 31% of the Communication department’s FY2019 total project workload.)

• Quality social media: The main Parks Facebook Page (managed singlehandedly by me) has grown from 1,748 to 8,264 followers since I took over its management in May 2016. (An increase of 373%.) In fact, the 2019 Parks Needs Assessment Survey showed that 42% of residents are aware of the main Parks Facebook Page, and it’s the preferred communication method for 41% of respondents to learn about Parks programs — a 20% increase since the last survey in 2013.

• Enabling the centers through social: All 21 community centers now have their own Facebook pages (originally created by me), have received social media training (provided by me) and are managing their own Facebook pages, in order to engage their audiences on a targeted, local level.

• Sweet spot of city-wide/localized marketing: Between the Recreation Catalog, the calendar feed on the city website, email newsletters, and NextDoor subscribers, I can guarantee that any given community center special event reached an audience of 70,000+ people, both in the center’s neighborhood/zip code and across the city.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Record number of applicants: This was the first year that I had the opportunity to oversee marketing for the Business Plan Competition from start to finish, and things kicked off with a bang! Due to a combination of my Facebook Live videos with former competitors, our eye-catching new graphic, a targeted Facebook ad, a handy media kit, and my boots-on-the-ground marketing visits to more than 30 locations throughout Fort Worth, this year’s competition received a whopping 80+ entries that demanded immediate scale-up across the competition. (We usually receive an average of 30 entries per year.)

• Robust, sustained campaign: As the event progressed, I produced over 30 graphics, articles, and other documents, and sold out both events on Eventbrite…we had to add more seats. Our finale announcement even got a placement on the NasDaq.com website. 

• Built out the competition’s digital hub: The Economic Development team purchased Submittable — a brand new, online one-stop-shop to submit, judge and score applications — which I ended up building out while simultaneously doing the marketing, as there was nobody else on the team who could do it. During a phone call, the Submittable customer service rep said she’d “never known anyone brand new to the Submittable system who had built out infrastructure for such a complex event and done it correctly, on the very first try.”

CAMPAIGN COLLATERAL

• Trailblazers wanted: Registration now open for Fort Worth Business Plan Competition (City News, May 2019)

• Top 30 move on in the City of Fort Worth’s ninth annual Business Plan Competition (City News, July 2019)

• Meet Fort Worth’s newest small business trailblazers at Pitch Night (City News, Sep. 2019)

• Kraken Motorsports wins 2019 Fort Worth Business Plan Competition (City News, Oct. 2019)

2019 ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT INITIATIVES

The City of Fort Worth’s Economic Development Department was doing A LOT in 2019, and several of my “behind-the-scenes” projects with the department were helping lay the foundation for more robust promotional efforts in the future.

highlights

• Incentive language re-write: I re-wrote the revised Economic Development Initiatives and the Tax Increment Financing District (TIF) overview, converting them from their original, legally-defined (and super-confusing) format into language better suited for marketing and promotion. My re-written text would later appear in both the FY2019 TIF Annual Report and in the local incentives section of the Thrive In Fort Worth website — a collaboration between the city’s Economic Development team and the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce that launched in early 2020.

• Promotional articles for complex initiatives: I wrote City News articles on, among other initiatives, the kick-off of the city’s iter8 Health Innovation District, the launch of Sparkyard, the Beck School of Construction, Global Entrepreneurship Week, and the sale/repurposing of the W.T. Waggoner Building in Downtown Fort Worth.

2019 NATIONAL PARKS MONTH CAMPAIGN,
THE CITY OF FORT WORTH

highlights

• I created a month-long social media campaign in less than 24 hours: I hadn’t planned to do a Parks Month campaign during July 2019 — I was simply swamped with too many other projects, and didn’t feel that I could give it the attention that it deserved. But when a member of city management specifically requested a Parks Month campaign on June 28, I stopped what I was doing and pulled together a robust content calendar that covered all aspects of the department’s programs and activities, using photos I’d personally taken and information I had on-hand.

• It became very popular: My National Park Month posts for 2019 received an average of 1,071 views and a combined total of 26,775 views, and were instrumental in helping the Parks Facebook page gain more than 1,827 new followers in 2019, without any paid advertising/promoted posts.

2019 Pension CAmpaign, THE CITY OF FORT WORTH

highlights

In early 2019, the City of Fort Worth’s pension faced a $1.6 billion unfunded liability which, if not addressed, would have resulted in the State Legislature making drastic changes to keep the pension fund solvent.

The City of Fort Worth’s last hope of solving this problem locally, in a way that was equitable for the organization and its three major employee groups, came down to an employee vote on city management’s proposed plan to fix the funding gap. The challenge? Not only would city employees be voting to increase their own contributions to the pension, but in order for the vote to pass, the city needed 50%-plus-one of the employee population to cast a vote in favor of it.

I led an ambitious internal communications campaign, the largest of its kind in city history, to help educate the city’s 6,600 employees on this complex topic prior to the vote. As part of this effort, I conceptualized and/or created more than a dozen internal communication materials in multiple media (web, print, copy/articles, infographics, etc.)

The employee vote was successful. A total of 74.47% of the City’s 6,589 employees voted, and of those, 59,49% (or 3,920 employees) voted in favor of the city management’s proposed plan.

Campaign Collateral (At LINKS OR BELOW)

• Pension Unfunded Liability explanatory graphic

• Pension Summary Document for General Employees, Fire Fighters, and Police Officers

• Letter from the City Manager (Ghost-written by me)

VICTORY FOREST COMMUNITY CENTER MARKETING CAMPAIGN, CITY OF FORT WORTH

During September 2016, the City of Fort Worth Park & Recreation Department made the decision to entrust all marketing and promotional efforts for its new state-of-the-art Victory Forest Community Center to my department, keeping this major marketing campaign in-house rather than outsourcing it to an advertising agency.

Construction on the center met with some delays, with the soft opening finally happening in January 2018 and a grand opening planned for March 2018. (Unfortunately, this timing also coincided with my being tapped as the City’s temporary webmaster without a backup.)

I provided assistance to the department in almost every capacity of this campaign, from helping advertise for focus groups, to providing updates on construction delays, to coordinating multiple print and digital campaigns that helped promote memberships and generate excitement for Victory Forest throughout the community.

Altogether, I produced more than 50 informational or promotional touch-points across a variety of media.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Lots of print pieces: I oversaw / art directed over 30 pieces of individual print pieces, including two bus bench ad campaigns, two direct mail campaigns, and numerous placements in print (including FW Connection, water bill, and local newspapers.)

• Appealed to diverse audiences: Almost half of these print pieces were bilingual, or produced in both English and Spanish, and everything incorporated the city’s relatively new-at-the-time branding standards and guidelines.

• A strong digital component was the center of this campaign, including multiple paid Facebook ads and posts on NextDoor, complemented by seven different City News and Roundup articles.

QUARTERLY RECREATION CATALOG,
THE CITY OF FORT WORTH

I laid the groundwork for the City of Fort Worth Recreation Catalog back in Fall 2017, creating processes and infrastructure to obtain and clean-up program/activity data from the city’s 21 community centers, as well as providing art direction for the final product. I did the lion’s share of the work standardizing the information and editing the first two catalogs, while the city’s graphic artists worked on the layouts. Afterwards, the Park Department liaison helped me shoulder the load — even so, each production took about six weeks from start to finish at our most efficient point.

Over time, what began as a large newspaper-like publication morphed into a slick, magazine-sized print piece, and what started as a time-consuming edit of a giant Excel spreadsheet eventually morphed into something that the graphics team and I could template out, to a certain extent. We experimented with different ways to categorize the data in several versions as well, in an effort to make things more efficient from a production standpoint. But no matter how hard we tried, the catalog was inevitably out-of-date before the ink dried — community center programs just fluctuated too much, with too much frequency.

The catalog has ceased production for the time being, but I’ve been working with the department to create a new version that will only be produced twice a year, and which will require minimal edits each time it’s produced due to limited space for center programs. The original version of the catalog averaged about 52 pages, and was distributed through the city’s various recreation locations.

Highlights

• 2019 Summer Recreation Catalog

• 2019 Fall Recreation Catalog (Final catalog published using this format)

2017 Facebook CampaignS, AGGIE CENTURY TREE PROJECT

In addition to bringing back the "Home for the Holidays" campaign that I’d done the previous year, I conducted a photoshoot at the Century Tree at Texas A&M University with a few personalized props in order to create a more robust fall campaign that could encompass multiple holidays during the main growing season for Century Tree seedlings.

Highlights

• The ads did their job extremely well: These three back-to-back campaigns — “Trick or Tree” (October), “Aggie Roots” (November) and “Home for the Holidays” (December) — generated a total of 75% of the business’ sales during 2017.

2017 Camp Fort Worth CAMPAIgn,
the city of fort worth

The Park & Recreation Department decided not to do a theme for Camp Fort Worth in 2017, so the campaign changed slightly to focus more on the character of the city's mascot: Molly the Longhorn. Time constraints resulted in using the same art for the fliers and the bus bench ads, but we were able to utilize the Molly mascot in several promotional materials, including a longhorn-shaped headband that was a hit at our local MayFest, and an "early bird" flier. As in past years, I wrote and art directed the creative for the campaign, while the art was produced by the talented local team at ShoNuff Studios.

2016 Camp Fort Worth CAMPAIgn,
the city of fort worth

The theme may have been different, but the cartoon characters from the previous year's Camp Fort Worth campaign remained nearly the same, in order to reinforce our visual identity with campers and parents alike. I wrote and art directed the design for all aspects of this campaign again; the art itself, as it was in 2015, was produced by the talented local team at ShoNuff Studios.

2016 National parks month campaign,
The city of Fort Worth

Due to a nonexistent budget, the 2016 National Parks Month promotional campaign was done entirely on Facebook. I visited several local parks that had an interesting history or unique features (like public art) and took the photos myself, which I was able to turn into "park spotlight" posts on social media. I interspersed these spotlights with photos from community center programs, athletic programs, and other recreational offerings. It was also a great opportunity to build the Parks Department's photo archive.

2015 National Parks Month Campaign,
The City of Fort Worth

The City of Fort Worth was sorely lacking in the graphics department when I did this campaign — we barely had an iStock account to our name, and only a single graphic designer for the entire organization who needed to focus on bigger projects.

I was just beginning to dabble in graphic design myself at the time, so I decided to supplement my rookie design skills by personally traveling around Fort Worth and taking pictures of major parks and recreation sites to incorporate into this campaign. It was a combination that the department liked — they weren’t fans of our “flat design” look up until that point (a necessity based on our lack of an iStock account and their lack of any good-quality photographs.) They also liked seeing actual Fort Worth locations in the designs.

The marriage of my photos and “silhouette” figures made for an eye-catching design, especially when produced on four large banners that went up around the city, and numerous smaller social media images that promoted the importance of getting outdoors and enjoying the many offerings of Fort Worth’s parks during July 2015.

2015 AggieCenturyTreeProject.Com,
The Aggie Century Tree Project

Not only did I design the website and re-develop the business plan from the ground up, so that the Aggie Century Tree Project could transition from a fundraiser into a business driven primarily by online purchasing, but I also created all the accompanying marketing materials such as business cards and print advertisements.

Highlights

• In 2016, my Facebook ad campaign for the Aggie Century Tree Project, “Home for the Holidays”, generated a little over one-third of the business’ total annual sales for that year.

2015 CAMP FORT WORTH CAMPAIGN,
THE CITY OF FORT WORTH

This campaign was the first of its kind for both me, as a relatively new City of Fort Worth employee, and for the Park & Recreation Department, who had never had the funding for a city-wide campaign of this magnitude before. Seeing as we didn’t have much graphic support or branding at the time, I reached out to a local comic book artist (ShoNuff Studios) and worked with him to create some customized “knock off superheroes” for the camp theme of “Superhero Academy”. The campaign included bus bench advertisements, posters, fliers, postcards, T-shirts, and specialty items.

highlights

• Camp attendance remained consistent, in spite of a $20 price increase from previous years. (A major detriment for many in our usual target audience.)

• Designs were incorporated into camp programming: We made black-and-white versions of the characters for kids to color/”create their own superheroes”, which were a big hit.

• Visual recognition success: Center staff also reported receiving phone calls from parents who specifically requested to sign their kids up for "the superhero camp".

2013 Festive By Nature Exhibit,
Botanic Research Institute of Texas

In addition to curating and installing this exhibition, I was able to completely brand and market it via social media, specifically through a "12 Days of Festive By Nature" countdown campaign in which I spotlighted a plant featured in our exhibition, along with a scientific or holiday-related fact, in the body of the post. I wrote and designed the exhibition's wall text as well.

Installation views of the Festive by Nature exhibit

SELECTIONS From THE MODERN BLOG

Note: Due to website maintenance, the original images that accompanied the posts on The Modern's website have been removed. I've added similar images here, in order to provide more context to the posts.

Looking for a more traditional resume? View it here.