Portfolio
I led a comprehensive rebranding of EdTrust’s national office and seven state affiliates, modernizing logos, websites, office signage, and all digital and print collateral to enhance visibility and cohesion. This transformation ensured a clean, unified, and impactful brand identity across eight locations and their social media channels while streamlining design processes for greater efficiency.
Key Achievements:
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Comprehensive Branding Guidelines: Developed a strategic branding framework that standardizes colors, typography, imagery, and messaging across all platforms, ensuring a cohesive and recognizable look for EdTrust nationwide.
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Digital & Social Media Consistency: Implemented branding standards across websites and social media channels, reinforcing a professional and engaging online presence for all affiliates.
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Integrated Canva Brand Identity: Uploaded branded templates and design assets into Canva, empowering communications leads to create eye-catching, high-quality graphics with ease. This allows our in-house graphic design team to focus on larger, high-impact projects while maintaining brand integrity across daily content.
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Unified Print & Report Design: Standardized the layout and design of EdTrust’s printed reports and publications, ensuring all materials look like they belong to the same family—reinforcing credibility, professionalism, and brand trust.
This rebranding effort strengthened EdTrust’s visibility, audience engagement, and operational efficiency, ensuring that every piece of content—from social media posts to policy reports—amplifies the organization’s mission with clarity and impact.
My strategy for releasing “And they cared”: How to Create Better, Safer Learning Environments for Girls of Color,” a joint paper with the National Woman’s Law Center, enabled the Ed Trust to showcase its outreach muscle. My strategic communications plan directed the communication team to create content that allows audiences to consume the report in multiple ways, including video, numerous blog posts, Q&A with an activist, and the paper itself.
Our outreach was critical to a front-page New York Times article, “A Battle for the Souls of Black Girls,” which focused on the policies and actions taken by adults that hurt Black students, especially young Black girls, and rob them of valuable learning time. Traditional media efforts resulted in my team earning over 20 original news stories in Yahoo News, MassLive, The Boston Globe, Diverse Issues in Higher Education, and Washington Informer.
As communications manager of the financial security projects at Pew, I worked alongside Senate staff to plan a press conference where U.S. Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Jack Reed (D-RI) joined Pew in calling for the nation’s financial institutions to voluntarily adopt a bank checking account fee disclosure form that was simple and transparent.
To reach our key audiences, my communications plan for Ed Trust's paper, Rising Tide: Do College Grad Rate Gains Benefit All Students?, focused on digital storytelling, including: an infographic, an author Q&A, an interactive data tool, and an eblast that went to higher education leaders.
The execution of the traditional media aspect of my plan landed more than 60 original news articles in outlets including The Washington Post and U.S. News & World Report. A key strategy for the release of this report was outreach to specialty media. Due to our translation strategy, we landed a story in EFE, which was reprinted by Univision, El Pregonero DC, and Fox News Latino.
Through Our Eyes Paper
A key component of our strategic plan for the release of Ed Trust's paper, Through Our Eyes: Perspectives and Reflections From Black Teacher, was to target teachers, more specifically Black teachers. So I led an effort to target general market publications, education-focused publications, and Black publications. As a result of this media push on the report’s release, Ed Trust earned more than 90 news articles, including placements in national outlets (The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and NPR); education-focused publications (Hechinger Report, Education Week, Education Post, and Principal magazine and Kappan magazine); and African-American-focused media (Roland Martin News One Now, Black Enterprise, The Root, News One, and HUR Voices on SiriusXM Radio).
Senate Event for Pew's Financial Security Projects
I planned and led a major partnership building event at the Capitol Visitors Center, “Moving from Major Reform to Major Success: What’s Next After The Credit Card Act Of 2009.” The standing-room-only program brought together influential stakeholders to reflect on lessons learned from the Credit CARD Act. It also gave Pew a great opportunity to introduce multiple audiences to Pew’s newest financial security projects.
The event featured two Hill champions, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO), who talked about the importance of financial security. The highlight of the event was a robust conversation with five finance reporters from Bloomberg, The New York Times, USA Today, The Associated Press, and The Wall Street Journal. The journalists discussed why the CARD Act worked and what the future might hold regarding financial security issues. Brent Staples, editorial writer for The New York Times, led the discussion.
Video Production
I direct both in-house videographers and external vendors to create engaging videos to capture the attention of each project's target audiences.
Video Production with a Vendor
Video Produced with an In-House Videographer
Animation with an In-House Designer
Video to garner an emotional response to act.
Advocacy Tools
I leverage the right vehicles and find the most effective tools to reach target audiences and entice them to act.
I led an online advocacy campaign with the Kids' Safe and Healthful Food Project (KSHF), a joint initiative between Pew and the Robert Wood Johnson Project, in support of USDA's proposed standards for snack foods and beverages sold in schools. The advocacy campaign earned more than 200,000 comments. To reach this number, KSHF's communications team partnered with communicators at MomsRising and Mission Readiness; ran targeted digital ads on Google, Facebook, and Twitter; leveraged earned media; and produced informative social ties and infographics.
To inform African Americans about the protections found in the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA, I led a team that created an ad that ran in USA Today’s Black History special edition. “Tomorrow’s Heroes are in Today’s Classrooms” emphasizes the need to ensure that Black children are given every opportunity to reach their full academic potential. The ad links to Ed Trust's "My Child Matters" page where readers can get more information on ESSA and the importance of subgroup accountability. The Communications team also drew people to the page using the hashtag #MyChildMatters via digital ads on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google.
Images are powerful, especially on social media. I work with Ed Trust's design team to create powerful images. Or I create them myself when content needs to quickly move to social.
To better inform Ed Trust's Board Members, I moved the organization away from a standard Word document to a visually appealing, magazine-style, online quarterly update. As part of this change, the organization is now able to showcase the cohesive work the organization does instead of the previous format where each of the organization's 12 divisions and three state offices reported on its own work.
When writing these reports, I ensure that they are dynamic enough to be used in courting new funders interested in improving the nation's school systems for the most underserved youth.
Learn more at EdTrust.org/QuarterlyReports