Hi.
Welcome to my digital home. I document food, fashion, feels and more.
Welcome to my digital home. I document food, fashion, feels and more.
PORTFOLIO OF SPECIAL PROJECTS
2023
I wrote about the Norfolk Southern train derailment fiasco in February 2023, thanks to my two wonderful editors at Slate, Natalie Shutler and Susan Matthews. Writing it was a fervor of assembling breaking news and finding folks to speak with via Facebook. I also interviewed my grandfather. The story was syndicated by Mother Jones and promoted on their Climate Desk social media channels. You can read it here. Photos are courtesy of Dave Anderson.
2021
I inherited the daily management and operations between NYM and our fulfillment house as the defacto subscriptions director for the consumer marketing team. As a result, I found myself often acting in a special-projects capacity, working on campaigns like a branded line of Milton Glaser merch. As part of the line, we designed a high-quality tote bag to be included as a new subscription perk; we found that adding totes boosted print subscriptions by 30% after including it as an offer on our subscription landing pages. We ran a test to ensure life for about six weeks before rolling it out to all of our LPs. For absolutely no reason at all, might I recommend watching this clip?
Courtesy of New York Magazine.
2020
One week after Covid-19 hit the city, New York’s Online Editor approached me about helping out on an audience survey. The goal was to ask readers about their experiences, perceptions, and general reservations/ hesitations about the pandemic. A panel of editors developed a core set of surveys, and my teammate and I were brought on to advise on the phrasing of the questions and answers, build the survey, and promote the link across our owned and organic channels. We kept our initial poll live for 24 hours until I closed it and ran the final analysis. The success of our first poll for the March 30th, 2020 print issue prompted us to continue running the poll over the course of 11 weeks. Eventually, we had enough for me to mock up some telling visualizations for our art department to include with the polls online. Links to full articles are below:
4/4/2020 1,350 New York Readers on the Mounting Challenges and Anxieties of Life During the Pandemic
4/19/2020 1,428 New York Readers on the Growing Mental Strain of the Pandemic; ‘Every day I think that I can’t do this anymore, and then the next day comes.’
5/23/2020 1,046 New York Readers on Their Plans for a Pandemic Summer; ‘Humid in a face mask. Drinking outside. Socially distanced play dates.’
5/30/2020 949 New York Readers on Summer Travel and Quarantine Pods; ‘Feels like we are in a swingers group.’
2020
Another special project I loved working on was New York’s October 22, 2020 print issue. The Brand Director, Product Manager, and I partnered with the masthead to create a Shopify site to sell single-issue copies of our “I Voted” sticker issue, featuring artwork by 48 different artists (our editorial team ran 4 versions of the cover, each with 12 stickers). In total our campaign sold 13k additional single-sale copies, increasing standalone issue sales by more than 80% than an average month. It also got a lot of buzz.
2018-2021
Email is a cornerstone of digital retention, making developing email creative and enabling their execution a cornerstone of my career. Below are examples of emails that represent the work between myself and our data engineer to create triggered, automated campaigns activated by a change in someone’s account.
Triggered sends are essential for communicating changes in subscribers’ accounts, and in a world increasingly aware of data privacy and familiarity with subscription services, folks expect to be told what’s going on in their accounts. At New York, I worked with our developers and data engineers to create pipelines for personalized transactional emails across registration, checkout, change in account status, autorenewal, cancelation, and newsletter opt-outs. Below are some examples of those emails, each represents a respective engineering scope and product sprint.
2018-2021
When folks start paying for your service, they expect a little information. Studies show people enjoy getting the 411. At New York, creating an onboarding/ new subscriber welcome series was actually much harder than I initially thought. Coming from the Times, I was used to promoting a wide array of products to a wide array of subscribers. Here, not so: we only had five newsletters at the time I joined, and we were just beginning to develop strategies and start consumer research and user outreach. In the beginning, we kept our welcome series factual and to-the point; we only had one designer produce creative brand assets for us during our paywall launch, and I was running out of creative fuel. I was also busy doing more..erm..urgent things, like setting up our digital support arm and our cancelation experiences. We also had to advise the editorial team on its budding newsletter strategy if we wanted to promote any newsletters.
When it came time to nail down an onboarding campaign, we focused outright on the types of journalism we produced; their qualities, services, and sensibilities. Also included were, in chronological order: essential information about their account/ terms and conditions (autorenewal and stuff like that); a breakdown of feature types and editorial favorites (intended to gauge early subscriber/ reader interest); a letter from our editors welcoming them, and giving a little history on the magazine; and a breakdown on our newsletter products.
2018- 2021
Newsletter development, testing, and general production began and ended with my team at NYM, helping our partners in editorial to launch new or experimental newsletter products. We’d conduct surveys and aggregate results of campaigns across editorial umbrellas, reporting takeaways and suggestions to stakeholders weekly. I ran the calendar for all subscriber and newsletter lists, managing targeted and ad-hoc, specialty email efforts (including our subscriber events) to our most engaged audience lists. I’d also run and report weekly aggregations for all our topline engagment, onboarding, cancelation, and newsletter email campaigns (until we hired a full time email manager, that is!).
Business As Usual
Here’s an example of the kind of one off engagement email I’d cook up for subscribers weekly; typically including round-ups of coverage targeting specific audiences we have reason to believe would find the coverage timely and interesting.
Our editorial team put together this digital package of mayoral news and profiles, and I created the brief, got the ok from the editors on the send/ copy, and requested some updates from the existing web files for the creative.
2018- 2021
Registration and checkout flows are an essential part of any digital subscription business, and conversion optimization is what keeps the lights on. At New York Mag, I partnered with the director of optimization to test into the strongest conversion experiences for subscribers, bringing in our brand and product designers and writing the copy for the standard and gift subscription experiences. After the build was underway, I’d pivot to squaring up their respective communications: receipts, onboarding emails, and onboarding surveys. I’d also make sure they were added to any necessary suppression lists, do a little list hygiene.
2019; 2020- 2021
I was responsible for spearheading quantitative research on subscribers and would work alongside my teammate, the audience manager, to develop and run surveys, conduct analysis, and provide feedback to editorial, product, and fellow marketing partners. We’d also use our research to further business development initiatives, like prioritizing the development of a new mobile app.
For more examples of my reporting, please reach out. In this example of a consumer research report I conducted, you’ll find the results of a cancelation survey run over the course of three months, along with comprehensive findings summarized from user interviews.
2018- 2021
If you head to nymag.com/help, you’ll see the customer experience desk I created in 2019 shortly after hiring my customer experience manager in order to facilitate subscriber research and increase rapid response for customer support. After three years, I’d took digital support from a single-seat Zendesk account to an in-house team of five agents and a full-time CX Director. During the launch of our paywall, we had to establish digital-first pipelines for customers and triage operations with our offsite fulfillment team of about 150 agents.
The helpdesk itself is a beast of burden. A good help hub provides clear, strong technical (but not too technical) writing that describes the most common issues facing users. As we evolved our customer experience team over the course of three years, I spent time consulting with in-house and outside counsel to establish the full breadth of our subscription legal terms: privacy policy, terms and conditions/ terms of use, editorial and commenting policies, autorenewal, refund, and billing policies. This is more of the behind-the-scenes stuff that keeps the CX operations running smoothly. I was additionally tasked with hiring a full-time, in-house team for CX, including a director and manager.
Above: The NYM FAQ Hub & Customer Portal. Below: Onsite for print fulfillment support training in Palm Coast, Florida.
2016- 2018
At the Times, I bounced from producing emails to managing all email correspondence to NYT subscribers, to targeting unique segments of subscribers and users with previously identified segments. I managed email operations teams, established best-practice reporting and campaign management, and got results: the Times was where I got my first proof that thoughtful marketing has longer-lasting results than spammy blasts. For each of these emails, I created the creative brief, project managed the creative asset development, and oversaw the final production of all email campaigns sent to US subscribers to the NYT.
On the NPV team, my scope on the Cooking app centered on data analytics and user research for new subscribers and free trial users. I was embedded in a team tasked with researching new engagement features and compelling messaging strategies for converting users in their first 30 days. As a result of this research, we began building campaigns.
Here’s the new onboarding series we created for Cooking:
And here’s the series we created for the New Products and Ventures Crossword & Games Subscribers standalone:
For Crosswords, I lead in-app engagement messaging and upsell strategies, converting up to 28% more users to a standalone purchase in 3 months. Below are some examples of the creative messaging I tested in the development of some of these in-app campaigns.
2017
Here’s me for The New York Times (2017) in the prototype for a shirt inspired by the film “Breathless.” During this time (fall 2016- summer 2017) I was a part of the team at the NYT Store that won a Publisher’s Award for our rebrand of the publication’s online shop. I own a real one now (it’s a knit!) and I wear it approximately once a week. You can buy the real thing here.
Endless thanks to my primary project partners at NYM, Shama Rahman and Alison Morgenstern, and my managers Allie, Fred, and Shannon at the Times. None of these campaigns would have come to fruition without them (and many others).
A special thank you to my former boss and perpetual role model, Jason Sylva.
