Sample Projects

Greyston

“Let’s Get to Work”
Brand strategy and messaging

Partner: Michael Bierut, Pentagram Design

For nearly 40 years, Greyston Bakery has been offering jobs to anyone who wants to work. If you can’t get hired because of history of incarceration, limited education or lack of work experience, Greyston will take you on, no questions asked: no resumes, no interviews, no background checks. They advocate a policy of radical inclusion called Open Hiring.

Each year, Greyston offers 5,400 individuals with employment, job-readiness and life skills training. In addition to the bakery, Greyston guides companies in implementing the Open Hiring model through programs and training at their Center for Open Hiring. 

To align the strategic goals of the bakery and non-profit, I partnered with Michael Bierut and his team at Pentagram Design to craft a compelling way for Greyston to tell their story and inspire others to join in: Let’s Get to Work.

My role included:

• Audience research

• Comprehensive rebranding of bakery, nonprofit sub-brands, and new Center for Open Hiring

• Messaging platform including brand story, tagline, and messaging socialization

• Donor, baker, corporate partner, community, and consumer messaging

University of Utah

Love, U Comprehensive Campaign

Partner: DJ Stout, Pentagram Design

Having already achieved their financial goals, the University wanted to use the final years of the campaign to increase participation and position its advancement efforts for continued success post campaign. Our strategy was to move from a campaign that focused on the institution to an inclusive, participatory campaign that focused on the institution’s people. Love, U works both ways — donors express their love for the U, and the U thanks donors who make so much possible.

Hugely successful, surpassing original $2 Billion goal, engagement far beyond alumni and current donors, Won Case Circle of Excellence Gold.

My role included:

• Developing strategic messaging approach

• Writing for all outreach from print to social and video.

Central Park Conservancy

“For All” Campaign

Partner: Michael Bierut, Pentagram Design

Designated a National Historic Landmark, Central Park was created with a simple but noble purpose: to be a respite from the pace and pressures of city life. With 42 million annual visits, Central Park is at risk of being "loved to death." For this reason, the Conservancy has undertaken a $420 million campaign to ensure the Park's future. In partnership with Pentagram Design, I was hired to translate an administrative case for support into an inspirational call to action to philanthropic leaders. The messaging needed to overcome perceptions that the Park is publicly funded and requires little maintenance, to express urgency without hand wringing, and to foreground the Park while also emphasizing the Conservancy's essential role.

My role included:

• Campaign "manifesto"

• Case statement

• 15 priority project overviews

UCI
University of California Irvine

“Brilliant Future”
Comprehensive Campaign

Communications Strategy, Messaging,
Case for Support, Website

The goal of UCI’s Brilliant Future campaign is to raise $2 billion and meaningfully engage at least 75,000, or about one in three, alumni. When I was hired, the campaign had its giving priorities, but it did not yet have a shape to this ambitious undertaking or a way to talk about it that was more than the sum of its parts. UCI is a remarkable university, thrilling to work with, because it is at the forefront of so much the world cares about. It is also a young university that has come into its own. The campaign is a chance to tell this story. Working with many stakeholders across a large university and health center, building on an existing campaign theme, and navigating an ongoing university rebrand, I developed a highly successful platform for the campaign.

MIT Libraries

"Saving the World Bit by Bit"
Brand Identity

Partner: Michael Bierut, Pentagram Design

The MIT Libraries rebranding project followed the release of MIT’s Future of Libraries Task Force report, which set an ambitious course for the Libraries in the coming decades. This included a new bold vision for the research library to become an open global platform.

I partnered with Michael Bierut and his team at Pentagram Design. As the project’s messaging strategist, I translated the Libraries’ vision into a narrative voice, point of view, and brand story that upends what many think about libraries today: powerful versus vulnerable.

My role included:

• Audience research

• Comprehensive branding building from strategic planning

• Messaging platform (brand manifesto, tagline, brand guidelines, audience matrix messaging)

• Verbal brand guidelines for different constituencies (students, alumni, donors, influencers)

Cause Communications

Impact Lab: A year-long series of experiments in best practice communications aimed at transcending divides.

Cause & Effect: A series of thought pieces on topics such as leadership, connection, and history.

Cause Communications is a nonprofit dedicated to helping purpose-driven organizations use communications to create positive social change. Cause works with foundations, nonprofits, socially conscious businesses, and the public sector and has provided consulting, tools, and training to more than 20,000 organizations in more than 45 countries. Following the 2020 elections, I partnered with Cause founder R. Christine Hershey and Vice President Vanessa Schnaidt to design and produce a series of experiments in communications to transcend divides.

Wesleyan

"This is Why"
Comprehensive Campaign

Partner: Michael Bierut, Pentagram Design

Described as an alumni body “allergic to brand” we set out to turn the bug into a feature. We embraced Wesleyan’s question-the-status-quo ethos with an “uncampaign” that built from the ground up with #thisiswhy hashtags and a slow-building reveal to the campaign, which was designed to make a Wesleyan education a cause worth fighting for.

Yale Schwarzman Center

“Break bread. Break boundaries.”
Tagline Development and Space Naming

Partner: Aron Fay, FAY

The new Yale Schwarzman Center is a center for student life and the arts that encourages social cohesion, creativity, and self-expression. It serves not only the campus community but the city of New Haven and includes in-person and digital platforms for global artists and performers. Its unique mission is “to leverage dining, conversation, and the arts as part of students’ educational experience, convening people across schools, disciplines, and communities for moments of discovery and connection.” With values of collaboration, wellness, belonging, inclusion, diversity, equity, and access, the Center sought a partner to help shepherd the naming of spaces and a tagline to set the right tone for this visionary new place.

Working with graphic designer Aron Fay, my role included:  

• Audience research

• Convening and leading stakeholder ideation and iteration

• Analysis of themes and development of a rubric through which to explore options

• Recommendations for multiple spaces and taglines

• Shepherding process to successful selections

Williams

"Where You're Most Likely to"
Recruitment Campaign

Partner: Michael Bierut, Pentagram Design

Already, one of the top-ranked liberal arts colleges, our charge was to position Williams to compete for undergraduates against top universities. We needed to convey Strength vs. Quirky, Cosmopolitan vs. Remote and University-level vs. College-level Advantages. Underlying many of the most impressive facts and experiences about Williams is an unspoken idea: At Williams—as opposed to almost any other college or university—students are more likely to experience or enjoy particular advantages. Our strategy was to make this unspoken idea explicit.

Following this successful project, Pentagram and I were invited to develop the strategy and messaging for the college’s Teach It Forward comprehensive fundraising campaign.

Columbia

"Columbia Blue"
Recruitment Campaign

Partner: Luke Hayman, Pentagram Design

Our strategy was to move “blue” from school color to school creed. Columbia Blue means living in a city driven by the smartest, newest ideas — both ambitious and humble. Working among intellectual giants past and present inspires students to take their own giant steps. Being the most diverse student body of any campus makes life more interesting, more fun, in a word – better. Connecting students to talented and successful alumni early and often is embedded in the Columbia experience. Having intellectual confidence forever is earned through Columbia’s one-of-a-kind Core Curriculum. “True blue” to all of this is the story we tell in these publications and complementary website.

Yale

"Yale*: An Insider's Guide"
Publications and Website

Partner: Michael Bierut, Pentagram Design

Designed to give undergraduate applicants an insider's view into Yale University, this recruitment campaign aims to make Yale more accessible to students from all backgrounds. The goal is to put every inquirer and applicant on an even footing as they explore Yale’s opportunities. The viewbook (complemented by a related website) is intended to be so interesting with its dense layers of detail from an annotated map of a residential college, to an illustrated listing of all the theater, music, film, and fine arts offerings in a typical weekend, to a series of vignettes detailing students’ studies abroad, accompanied by the students’ own photographs — that prospects would find it hard to throw away.