Building Campaign Sites at The Ad Council 

From August 2017 to November 2020, I worked at the Ad Council—a 100+ year old nonprofit that creates campaigns for a variety of pressing social causes in the United States. During my tenure, I worked as a Digital Product Manager managing a slate of websites for non-profit clients like Susan G. Komen, Meals on Wheels, Love Has No Labels, and others. 

Meals on Wheels needed help recruiting people to bridge the gap between a quickly growing senior population and the organization's shrinking number of volunteers. Partnering with Anomaly and The Matrix Group (TMG), we created a simple landing page for prospective volunteers to find out more about volunteering, view our PSAs, and most importantly, sign up to volunteer. As the DPM on this project, I provided creative direction on the site's UI and UX.  

Using SendGrid, we helped accurately sort volunteers to local Meals on Wheels chapters across the United States. We also created an email system that followed up with prospective volunteers in one-week, two-week, and 28-day intervals after they signed up—in an effort to increase enrollment conversion rates with their local MOW chapter.

My work on this campaign helped recruit over 100,000 volunteers for Meals on Wheels. Our site also received a 2018 Platinum Award in the AVA Digital Awards. 

The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and the JED Foundation commissioned the Ad Council to create a campaign that empowered young adults to talk to their friends about mental health. Partnering with Droga5 and HAUS, we created a mobile-first experience to help teens identify signs of struggle, as well as ways to approach friends who might be going through difficult times. 

As the lead DPM on this campaign, I led Droga5 and HAUS in building the site from concept to execution. We helped their teams develop the UX/UI, copy, illustrations, and GIFs used throughout the site based on user feedback and our issue expertise. This site received shout-outs in Mashable, Billboard, and Bustle. 

How do you educate a community about something they cannot see? For many years, the Ad Council's Love Has No Labels campaign has pushed individuals to learn about their implicit biases, which are unintentional assumptions we make about identity labels like race, religion, age, gender, sexual orientation, or ability. 

When Love Has No Labels originally launched, the website was a simple landing page that was quickly created in the wake of our unexpectedly viral Skeletons campaign. The site mainly focused on education around implicit biases, as well as driving users to share the campaign online.

As a DPM on this project, I worked alongside our design firm Viget to reimagine this website and its tools. The website now has a plethora of resources, including a comprehensive glossary; resources for teachers, college students, and parents; a tool to help individuals reflect on their biases; a LHNL filter for people who want to share our brand and message on their social channels; and much more.

Since 2009, the Ad Council has partnered with the U.S. Forest Service on a national nature promotion campaign to encourage parents to bring their children outside. As of 2019, DiscoverTheForest.org remained a valuable resource for parents seeking out local forests, but hadn't gotten an update since its original campaign launch a decade earlier. 

As a DPM on this project, I worked collaboratively with the design firm Viget to modernize this site. We wanted to create an experience for English and Spanish users that would make the outdoors feel accessible and hassle-free; provide a useful tool that gives visitors relevant, actionable results; and inspire kids to get excited about their next excursion. 

The result was a website with a revamped park search experience, detailed activity guides for everything from tree-identifying to bird-watching, and resources for parents, educators, and community members.