BUILDING THE CREATIVE ENGINE INSIDE THE BRAND.
Creative Leadership
Capability Building
Team Leadership
Brand Storytelling
Content Strategy
Creative Operation
Video & Photo Production
MY ROLE
Turning video and photography from an occasional service into a strategic creative capability.
When I joined Blackbaud, its in-house creative agency was already well established in design and copy. Video was different. The company had produced video before, but there was no dedicated internal capability for developing, producing, and scaling the work.
I was hired to build it.
At the same time, the broader Center of Excellence was undergoing its own transformation, moving from an internal service provider toward becoming a true strategic and creative partner to teams across the business.
Video and photography had an opportunity to help prove what that could look like.
Blackbaud is a global technology company serving organizations working across nonprofits, education, healthcare, corporate social responsibility and other social-impact sectors.
As co-leader of its in-house creative agency, I helped lead the people, processes and productions responsible for bringing the brand's stories to life across the organization.
And the asks rarely looked the same twice.
Brand campaigns. Customer stories. Executive communications. Product explainers. Premium content. Corporate social responsibility. Global events.
A global corporate brand, nine separate business verticals, sales enablement, go-to-market, thought leadership and user conferences, webinars, and podcasts.
Sometimes, often, all at once.
We Give Back
Blackbaud is a company built around helping organizations do good. But some of the strongest evidence of that mission was happening inside the company itself.
We Give Back turned the lens toward Blackbaud's own people and the ways they were supporting organizations, communities, and causes they cared about.
The campaign became the centerpiece of Blackbaud's first video-driven CSR report, using nine films to tell the larger corporate responsibility story through the people actually doing the work.
9 Films
Across the Campaign
First-ever
Video-driven CSR report
Building the Capability
GOOD WORK CREATED DEMAND FOR MORE GOOD WORK.
One of my earliest opportunities was Blackbaud's participation in Charleston's annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade.
Rather than simply documenting the event, I approached it cinematically, creating something emotional, visual, and human.
It showed teams across Blackbaud what was possible when video was treated as a creative discipline rather than simply a production service.
The requests started coming.
As demand grew, I built the systems and processes for how video and photography would be requested, scoped, developed, produced and evaluated across the organization.
I led the development of templates, production standards and brand guidelines for video and photography, while building relationships across Global Brand, PR, Recruiting and Blackbaud's vertical marketing teams.
The goal wasn't simply to make more content. It was to make the internal creative team a partner teams wanted involved earlier.
The Ecosystem of Good
3 Partners
1 Greater Mission
bbcon
The tech conference for a better world
When the stage disappears, build a new one.
COVID halted much of our planned customer storytelling and forced Blackbaud's annual user conference to go fully virtual.
Working with the events team and our production partner, I oversaw video production across an enormous schedule of remotely recorded sessions while helping rethink graphics, intros, speaker content, and storytelling for an experience that now lived entirely on a screen.
Nobody had a perfect playbook. We built ours while we were doing it.
THEN WE HAD ANOTHER YEAR TO MAKE IT BETTER.
For bbcon 2021, simply replicating another virtual conference wasn't enough. We wanted some of the energy, presence and production value people had been missing from live events.
So I pitched building a stage inside Blackbaud's offices.
We brought in staging, lighting, gobos, teleprompters and production infrastructure, creating an environment where speakers could address a global virtual audience with something closer to the energy of a live event.
