Brand & Positioning

Empower Schools

As Empower Schools’ founding communications leader, I built the organization’s enterprise communications function from the ground up, creating the brand infrastructure, internal systems, workflows, and strategic messaging needed to support a growing national education nonprofit.

INDUSTRY

IMPACT

SCOPE

ROLE

Enterprise communications, brand strategy, internal communications, systems design

Founding Head of Communications

Visibility gains, audience growth, positioning, revenue attribution

Nonprofit, Education Consulting

THE CHALLENGE

Empower Schools had strong work, a growing team, and increasing partner demand, but no dedicated communications function. Messaging, materials, brand application, and internal communications varied across teams.

The organization needed more than communications support. It needed an enterprise system for making communication clearer, faster, and more consistent across teams.

The need went beyond simple communications support. To grow, the organization needed a system for making communications clearer, faster, and more consistent across teams.

WHAT I BUILT

Brand expression, positioning, templates, standards, consistency.

01

Brand Infrastructure

OKRs, project planning, meeting structures, internal updates, team clarity.

02

Internal Communications & Operating Alignment

Executive & Cross-Team Communications Support

03

Executive & Cross-Team Communications Support

Annual report, thought leadership platforms, public storytelling, field-facing content.

04

Thought Leadership & External Visibility

SELECTED WORK

RESULTS

of staff agreed they understood key OKRs and how they contributed, up from 45% YoY.

95%

subscriber growth

45%

average rating on reputation aggregators including Charity Navigator

100%

The communications function became a trusted internal resource for improving quality, alignment, and consistency across the organization. Consistently and quality raised the standard, protecting an outstanding reputation.

average NPS rating across all stakeholder archetypes

93%

STRATEGIC IMPACT

directly attributable opportunities, annually

$3M

Building communications as an enterprise function gave Empower the infrastructure to align internally, show up consistently, and tell a clearer story externally. Brand, messaging, internal alignment, and audience engagement became growth drivers, contributing to $3M+ in directly attributable program and development opportunities annually.

Comms became the system for how the organization aligned, signaled, and grew.