The Botanic Garden at Historic Barns Park

Located in the heart of Traverse City on the beautiful grounds of Historic Barns Park.

The Botanic Garden is a year-round sanctuary of environmental preservation, recreation and education. Its 25 acres nurtures the soul, enlivens our history and promotes Michigan’s natural beauty. With an emphasis on plant species native to northwest Michigan, it creates and enhances habitats for various forms of wildlife.

As a place of refreshment and solace, The Botanic Garden’s unique and original design strives to inform and inspire. After over a decade of careful planning and preparation, the garden is coming alive.

Board Member

MarketJoy, Inc.

- Oversaw all B2B cold email campaigns for clients, including copywriting, A/B testing, and analyzing conversion results.
- Recruited, trained, and managed a team of freelance copywriters across several countries and time zones.
- Managed accounts for key strategic customers, including Western Union.
- Developed a campaign that resulted in $880,000 in new revenue for a client within 6 to 8 months.
- Fostered strong customer relationships that significantly influenced renewal revenues.
- Conducted onboarding calls and facilitated other customer-facing meetings for a portfolio of 70 companies.

Director of Content Strategy

Hexarmor

Marketing Specialist

Net2NO

In August of 2008, I founded the Net2NO meetup group (http://net2no.com), and on September 16th, 30 people attended our very first meetup. Since then, our group has grown to nearly 1,000 members, and is currently the 5th largest Net2Local meetup in the world, following Toronto, Vancouver, DC and San Francisco.

As co-organizer, I've helped plan more than 50 monthly meetups on topics ranging from SEO and Algorithms, Transparency and Politics, Louisiana's Digital Media Tax Incentives, Guerilla Volunteering, Neighborland, 9th Ward Field of Dreams, Kickstarter, and Technology in Teaching. We've also had special events such as the Netty Awards, our annual Net2NO BBQ+Boil, and the epic SXSWi Road Trips in 2009 and 2010. 

By building a local community of innovators and entrepreneurs, I proved to New Orleans that we do have a tech community, and as a result we now have a thriving startup ecosystem that's getting national attention. 

Net2NO's spinoff groups and companies include: Launchpad, TribeCon, Evacuteer, GNOCODE, Hack Nights, NewOrleansTech.net, and we've been called "the grandfather of the tech and startup community in New Orleans." 

My role has been to provide the energy, excitement, introductions (and beer) that have helped Net2NO grow organically, without any marketing or advertising. When one person comes to an event, they go home and tell 5 people about it.

My co-organizers and I plan monthly events: booking venues, lining up speakers and coming up with topics, securing event sponsors (i.e. beer sponsors), and everything else that's involved in producing an event.

Net2NO won CityBusiness Innovator of the Year, has become the unofficial "welcome wagon" for people new to the city, and is the umbrella organization through which other local groups can communicate with one another.

Founder & Co-Organizer

Yelp.com

As the Yelp New Orleans CM, I handled all the local events and marketing for Yelp, including writing the New Orleans Weekly Yelp Newsletter (http://yelp.com/weekly/new-orleans). Throwing elaborate, fabulous parties once a month for the Yelp Elite Squad, developing marketing partnerships with likeminded organizations, being out and about at local events around town, and providing support, answering questions, and educating the local business owner community and current/prospective yelpers on all the awesome things you can do with Yelp.com and the Yelp mobile app.

New Orleans Community Manager

Backyard Shed Films

I developed the Wordpress site for their latest film, Trailer Park Jesus (which got into the New Orleans Film Festival! Yay!). In addition to building and maintaining the site, I also help with PR and events, promotions, outreach, and setting up an online store to sell TPJ merchandise. Previously, I threw the film premiere party for Backyard Shed Films' first feature comedy, Let's Rob the Cheese Shop. The event was held at One Eyed Jack's, and featured the three bands that played music for the film, as well as two different screenings of the film.

Marketing Director & Rapid Deployer

VoodooTEQ

Provided consulting services to small and mid-sized businesses on all things marketing-related, with an emphasis on web and social media marketing, especially search engine optimization. I've helped get businesses set up with Wordpress, moving their existing website over to a much more user-friendly platform that allows non-technical users to update and maintain a website, without heavy reliance on a developer to make basic edits to the content of their site. I've advised on blog, Twitter, Facebook and e-newsletter marketing strategies, undertaken total rebranding projects (with admirable success, if I do say so myself), and I've been contracted to plan and execute events such as concerts, networking events, and a film premiere party.

Internet Marketing, Social Media, Event Management Consultant

LISTA

In what turned out to be a short-lived position with the Louisiana Internet Software and Technology Association, I worked with the board of directors as a commission-only employee recruiting new members to the organization. The goal was to grow LISTA's membership and revenue to the point that they could hire at least a part-time staff member, but unfortunately I had to step down from my position in order to pursue a full time opportunity (that is, land my dream job) with Yelp.com.

Director of Membership Development

MakeBuzz, LLC

This job is where I learned the arcane knowledge of Search Engine Optimization, from the person who had basically invented it. My role entailed writing a lot of meta data (browser titles and the snippets you see when you do a Google search). I worked on the United Airlines account, and helped maintain their #1 Google rank for the word "airline" and "airlines." 

In addition to writing metadata for United Airline's main website, I also developed metadata for their international websites including France, Spain, Italy, Japan, China, Argentina, and the UK. This involved researching relevant keywords for each country, developing search optimized metadata that accounted for cultural language issues (i.e. in the UK people go on "holiday" rather than "vacation"). I developed this content in English, which was translated by UA's international employees. The native-language versions were sent back to me for review. I made minor edits and corrected typos, and re-optimized the content for search.

In the short time I did work for this client, I traveled to Chicago to meet with the primary stakeholders and decision-makers (in charge of web stuff) at United Airlines HQ. During this meeting, we explained the work MakeBuzz had been doing in layman's terms, so the client would fully understand the importance and results of an otherwise technical and bewildering service.

Search Specialist

Legacy Donor Foundation

Recruited by a Legacy Donor Foundation board member to coordinate fund development initiatives for the organization.  Managed transfer of donor database from Microsoft Access to E-Tapestry database software.  Launched web-based and social media fundraising programs.  Revised marketing materials, with a specific focus on fundraising/sales letters for annual gala event.  Improved sponsorship benefits list to encourage larger contributions.  These new fundraising letters and sponsor benefits raised $276,262 gross revenue for the 2009 event.

Development Coordinator

Growing plants. Building communities. Sailing boats.

Taplio

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