Work.
I've spent over 25 years making fundraising feel more human. Turns out that's also what makes it work.
The stuff I love.
Concepts & Themes
Emotional concepts, technical concepts, grand arching thematics... Creating the most direct path to a donor's head and heart. I live for this. I wake up with scripts and headlines floating in the room.
Insights & Research
Left and right brains. I love listening to nerds explain results, and I love partnering on insight development. I know the power that comes from the stories we find in data. It takes creative from ideas to impact.
Ingenuity
Ingenuity goes beyond innovation. Innovation is shiny, ingenuity is gritty and greasy, and is practiced by those with passion. Those with a nonprofit budget and ethical stewardship. Let's be ingenious!
Real world experience
I have been building and leading teams of brilliant, ingenious designers and strategists and writers and coders for the better part of three decades. But wait! I'm not some old and jaded Creative, lurking around a skatepark. "Back in my day we used Flash animations, and we liked it!" Somehow, I've kept my spark.
Every day I work is a day that I remember why I chose this field. You see, back then...in the 00s...my wife had a baby. A baby that only weighed 2 1/2 pounds. Going through that experience deeply burned into my core a need to do "good" with my career. [Oh, don't worry...wife is fine, kid is a senior at Georgia Tech.] So, that is my spark, my drive to do great work that improves the world. That kind of experience sure can focus a mind...
My mission?
Grand Scale
I want 0.14% more of the US GDP to end up in the hands of nonprofits
— that's $40 billion –
And I think that's entirely achievable if we make philanthropy meaningful again. Let's focus on more human connections.
Small Scale
I want to make clients cry with their own realized passion when I present ideas to them because I am using what I love - creative, data and ingenuity - to architect their good in a way that truly inspires donors.
(it’s happened more than once)
Yeah...
But, what do you do?
Leadership
I build and run creative departments and the cross-functional partnerships that make their work have impact. My job is making rooms full of smart people get smarter together.
-
Building and leading creative departments — copy, art direction, design, channel strategy
-
Directing omni-channel campaigns at $2M–$20M+ scale
-
Founding new agency practices from scratch — digital direct response at BKV, digital strategy at Grizzard, and Latino audience work at TLC
-
Hiring, mentoring, and developing creatives at every level
-
Working across account, data science, strategy, and the clients themselves
-
Leading new business pitches
-
Presenting work to senior client leadership and boards
Strategy and Systems
Above the campaign level. This is where I think most executives actually live, and where a Senior Creative earns their keep.
-
Foundational offer development and messaging architecture
-
Segment- and persona-specific offer development with data science
-
Creative platform development that holds up across channels and years
-
CX "North Star" workshops aligning leadership vision, donor insights, and creative strategy
-
Donor experience design: cross-channel flows that feel like a story
-
Modular design systems for segmented, multichannel campaigns
-
AI-powered content systems for persona-level storytelling across digital, mail, social, and CTV — custom GPTs and Claude tools, human spine
-
Agency process design — architecturally trained, diagrams for a living
-
Insight and test-design partnership with data science teams
Craft and Direction
Making things is what brought me into this field. It's what keeps me here. My team gets a leader who's in the work right next to them.
-
Conceptual copywriting and headline development
-
Art direction in Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop)
-
Thematic design and visual systems
-
Video and CTV concept and direction
-
Photography — I'm a working photographer
-
AI image direction in Midjourney for concept and mockup
-
Presentation design that tells the story
Example
What if the kid chose you?
We were in Seattle for a two-day technical workshop on the neuroscience of philanthropy — a genuine deep dive (chemistry included) into why people give, what compassion actually looks like in the brain, what motivates sustained generosity.
During a coffee break, I turned to my client partner and said something like: what if we turned the whole thing around?
Not a donor browsing children like a catalog. A child choosing their sponsor. The child with agency. The donor waiting to be chosen — seen by a kid in Ghana holding their photograph, deciding something.
What if a child in a fragile place looked into the camera and said: I'm supporting Barbara.
That conversation on a coffee break became World Vision's Chosen — a campaign still running today, still flipping the power dynamic of child sponsorship on its head. The concept was born from a question, not a brief.
The best ideas usually are.
Let's talk.
I enjoy geeking out about this stuff, and sharing ideas. So please do give me a buzz if you would like to discuss concepts and intelligent ideas in the world of compassion. Thanks very much!