I actually started off as a journalist, so I worked covering professional sports in Tucson, Arizona, for the afternoon newspaper there and really hadn't thought that I was going to get into journalism as a career. I was originally pre-law, I was a national mock trial champion so there was some feeling that was where I was headed, and the more lawyers that I talked to the more unhappy, I realized many of them were. So I changed career paths, kind of in midstream and journalism had always been a backup for me and I always have done a lot of writing in college. I did some work for the local newspapers on kind of a freelance basis so it seemed like the next logical step, right? So I got into newspapers, I was reporting on sports, and then I got promoted to the City Hall beat so I reported on that for a while, I covered cops and courts and then moved from Tucson to Nashville, Tennessee, where I started working as an investigative reporter and an editor and first started doing kind of significant reporting in technology, actually still do a lot of writing for Forbes, PC gamer, Tech radar, and Polygon and a bunch of other folks on video games and tech to this day as a freelancer, but started my work as an internationally-syndicated columnist on technology there and then jumped to Detroit, where I worked for the free press as part of their investigative team doing what was really charmingly, then identified as computer-assisted reporting. So basically data analysis that led to stories and investigations and then from there, as the newspaper industry sort of plummeted, I took the leap to join the University of Michigan in their book publishing division. So comfortable place I was still killing trees for a living. But then my job there, instead of being in directly in writing, was in marketing and communications. So I handled kind of the promotional campaigns for the books that were sold in bookstores across the country, it was pretty busy, and then jumped from there to the school of information at the University of Michigan, where I was the marketing communications director there, helping to connect students who might be interested in a career in information with the program and also to work with communications for kind of all of the other units within, so stories about our research, for example, or about the cool things that our students were doing, videos and social media presence and all of that sort of thing. I joined the Office of University Development for the University of Michigan earlier this year, actually, just one week before the stay home orders went out for covid so there are many people on my team that has not met me in person at all, except as part of the job interview process so that's been super exciting. And as the senior executive director for marketing and communications at OUD actually, direct the university's communications and marketing strategy for reaching out to folks who might be interested in sponsoring all kinds of philanthropic activities at the university. So we'll take folks that are interested in supporting the university and will help to connect them with programs and projects and people, student support certainly, that might be of interest to them to contribute money to over the course of in some cases, years or a lifetime. So it's been a super exciting ride. I was in journalism for 25 years, and I still consider myself, in many ways, a journalist. So I continue to write on a regular basis but it's been an interesting kind of bringing together of all of those skills in terms of data, in terms of writing, and in terms of marketing in the current position, so it's been super exciting.

In terms of responsibilities and decisions, marketing and communications involves a number of different facets. So for us, there's branding in terms of what do we want people to think about when they think of the University of Michigan, what are the qualities or characteristics that people associate with the university, and how do we express that through the materials that they received from us? Because what we send out colors people's perceptions of the university so we want to make sure that those were in alignment with university priorities. So in terms of branding, responsibilities, and decisions, I'm involved in most, if not all, of the communications that go out on a broad basis from our office so all of the emails that go out, all of the campaigns that are launched, all the social media posts that are created right through my office. So my job is in part making sure that all of those are in alignment with those types of messages that we want to communicate on a broad level. If there are priorities within the university, things that desperately need funding, to make sure that those are reflected and also to make sure that the overarching kind of values of the university is reflected in each of those individual types of communications so that we're not way out in the left-field compared to what the rest of the university is doing, and we're presenting an accurate picture of the kinds of things that people can support at the university. The top three priorities are definitely driving private philanthropic support for the university. There's a lot of folks who would like to fund the University of Michigan on a big basis or a small basis, and it's my job to make sure that they have, a clear path to do that and some compelling stories that helped them to understand what their donations or their philanthropy might do right for the organization. So, that's definitely the number one with a bullet number two is making sure that folks who have donated to the university continue to receive updates and information that might help them to understand what the benefit of their gifts have been so that they know "okay, I made this contribution and it could accomplish something constructive, it helped the student graduated, helped a project come to fruition" those things that people are really wanting to make sure happens as a result of their donations. So in some ways, stewardship, and kind of that concept of accountability and transparency to make sure that folks know, this is exactly what's happened. Number three on the list of priorities, I think, is helping folks to become acquainted with the University of Michigan as a potential place where they might want to support students or faculty who are doing cool things on a daily basis because there may be some folks who have some connection with us, even if it's distant who haven't given that a whole lot of thought. So if you want to think about those three priorities, kind of, in a nutshell, one is actually driving donations to the university, one is helping folks who have donated to understand exactly what's happened with their money and to feel like we're doing a good job of stewarding it for them and then one is helping to forge new connections between people and the university that they didn't have before. My weekly work hours, sadly, I'm at the executive level so there is a pile of meetings. I would say that my work is probably roughly split at this point between helping to guide others who are doing work in this area and helping to approve or shape materials as they're coming together. So I probably spend half of my work week talking about what we should be doing and helping to kind of lay out those plans and the other half of the work week, helping to provide guidance or feedback on those things that folks are producing in order to enact those plans. It's like all upper management, I spent a lot of time, sort of pointing out the goal and then steering the ship as opposed to being the people who are actually growing the oars which is one reason why I still do journalism on the side, that ability to kind of keep my hand in for doing on a regular basis so I don't lose touch. but that's kind of a basic description of what my work week or responsibilities look like.

So I think one of the big problems that everybody deals with marketing and communications is how much noise there is out there. We've got information bombarding us from all sides, things that we reach out to look at so if you think about kind of your favorite social media sites and kind of scrolling through those that may be an example of information that you invite to come to you, but there's also a lot of things that show up in your inbox that maybe you didn't necessarily ask for that sort of clog up those input areas so everybody is kind of drowning in information and one of the big pain points or one of the big questions or challenges that we have to deal with on a regular basis is how do we cut through all of that noise to reach a new individual person and let them know about something that they may find valuable right in the long term. I think in terms of approaches, one of the things that we try to keep in front of mind always is the concept of what's important to the donor or the potential donor in our case. So what is the audience need because that allows us kind of like UX or UI, allows us to start a focus on the needs of the people that we are working with and then how we can meet those needs. I thought before I got into development that it would feel a lot more like sales, like, "Hey, we've got this great opportunity and I'm going to sell you on how you can take advantage of it" but in reality, it feels a lot more like matchmaking in the sense that there are already people who are interested in donating to the university or have the capacity to donate and are looking to support a philanthropic cause and it's really my job to figure out how can I hook them up with those opportunities that make the most sense for them, that feels the most natural, that align with their interests so, from our perspective, strategies for kind of identifying what those interests are and then helping to present that information in a concise way hopefully to those folks tends to be fairly effective at getting their attention because you're aligning really closely with things that they're interested in anyway. So instead of focusing on these are our needs exclusively what we're looking at is how do we pair those needs that we have with those donors who are most interested in kind of supporting those needs, and that feels a lot more organic. It also feels like we're serving the donor a lot better. So that's definitely one of the major challenges. We are also in an extremely decentralized university, which means that there are individual people within schools, colleges, units across the university, we are a very big place, with 40,000 faculty, and staff. There are folks within every one of those units who do a little bit of what I do and so that concept of bringing together all of those people on campus to try and strike some unified themes, to try and make sure that what we're saying in one place doesn't directly contradict what we're saying someplace else, is always an ongoing challenge, and that's not true just from my job there's also that same thing happening in terms of ongoing support across the university in virtually every area. So the IT guys have different people who are using different types of programs across the university. Or, those folks are handling HR or other functions are handling different requests, different types of structures, that folks are maintaining across the university. So we do a lot of communication with our colleagues. We have a group of communicators specifically related to development. There's also some campus-wide groups for communicators in general, what we try and kind of get a sense of here's what everybody else is doing, here is what we're doing, and here is how everything kind of aligned somewhere in the middle so that's one of the ways that we address that challenge as well.