I believe that the most critical foundation of meaningful communications is a strong, data-driven strategy. My first goal when beginning a new project - whether that be a massive digital campaign, or simply an updated day-to-day social strategy - is uncovering trackable goals by which we’ll track our success, bonus points if those goals roll up into your organization’s strategic goals. From there, I’ll work to help you shape up your brand identity: the lens by which you’ll craft your storytelling, the imagery that exemplifies your authentic stakeholders and issues, and the messaging that truly achieves your vision. Included here is an example of how this strategy is brought to life, via a brand guide. In this guide, I worked collaboratively with my advocacy and communications teams to dive deeply into our messaging platform: what are the big questions/issues we’re fighting/fighting for? How do we want to react and redefine our brand through proactive storytelling? You can check out how I’ve shaped campaigns through this guide by checking out any of the case studies on this page.
Whitespace is the name of my print design game. I love clean, beautiful design that uses authentic imagery, meaningful brand standards, and fun mixes of textures and colors. I have experience designing everything from magazines, to postcards, to event booklets, signage and more. My hope is that piece to piece, my audiences can feel that special “Grace” touch in my work.
Brand is my passion. Beginning my career within the award winning Michigan State University communications umbrella, I have built a reputation as a brand specialist who can help organizations and small businesses define their special sauce and curate powerful storytelling that exemplifies their impact. Brand storytelling campaigns are a meaningful, high-level project that I love leading as a brand impact strategy. These projects typically involve deliverables from editorial stories, to full-length video features, to social media campaigns and more - and I love being involved from start to finish. Whether you’re seasoned in the brand campaign game, or you’ve never tried this strategy, check out the huge impact they can have, and hit me up with your interest!
At MAPSA, one of our primary functions is advocating on behalf of nearly 300 charter schools and over 150,000 charter families through targeted legislative work. As our communications lead, it is my job to weave our strategic brand storytelling into our advocacy messaging, supporting our government relations team to activate our supporters when issues arrive, or even when we have exciting legislative opportunities. Over my nearly four years with the organization, we have continued to help close the equity gap in per-pupil student funding - and I have pushed us to grow our digital advocacy work, including vamping up our digital activation (action) pages, producing coordinated social media advocacy campaigns, and working within Facebook ads to run geofenced ad projects in alignment with priority legislative districts.
As we are a member association, it is not just the public who we must engage in these efforts - it is our member school leaders, teachers, authorizers and operators. In addition to pushing our advocacy messaging on our platform, I’ve also worked to continuously develop resources and tools for our charter schools and advocates to use on their own platforms to advance our efforts.
One of the projects that has been near and dear to my heart during my time at MAPSA is the Michigan Charter School Awards. In this program, we collect private nominations from charter school educators, family members, students, alumni, and advocates for two award categories: teachers and school administrators (Principal or similar role). After an open application period for any nominee, we internally screen applicants to get 10 semifinalists in each category, then a panel of external judges selects first our top 5 finalists in each category, and eventually our winners. When I began leading this project two years ago, my primary goal was to transform it into a digital storytelling powerhouse, earning us key engagement on social platforms through beautiful, high-quality video storytelling, and even strengthening earned traditional media coverage. As an advocate for public education, it is also a tremendous honor to work so closely with educators over the course of the project. Each year, the digital engagement results continue to grow - and as we learn, we continue to adapt and improve with each cycle. In the past two cycles, COVID has challenged our ability to get into school buildings for filming - but we’ve adapted. This year, we resumed in-person filming via a film location in Lansing, and used the “Instagram Takeover” strategy to allow each of our ten finalists to give us the inside look at their school, and their story.
The intersection of digital communications and advocacy work has exploded with the growth of social platforms. Today, your most energized advocates can show their support for a given cause or mission not just by showing up for rally, but also by signing online petitions, completing online letters to lawmakers, using their social platforms to amplify your messaging, and so much more. In 2019, MI Governor Gretchen Whitmer struck down a funding increase solely for charter school students, while OKing the same funding increase for all other public school students - the result could have been a $35M loss for charter learners across the state. MAPSA (my team) led an effective strategy at the grassroots, legislative, member, and communications levels to make charter voices heard and seen by not only Gov. Whitmer, but all other decision makers. Along with thousands of our supporters, we effectively restored the funding increase for charter students.
