Highlights
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Created a proven, effective, online conference built on learning and practicing soft skills. I hosted this conference four times, helping over 3,500+ attendees see things differently.
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Developed a powerful, 5-day online leadership workshop for curious thinkers ages 16-25. In eight months, 350 young leaders graduated, feeling empowered and prepared to lean into possibility and make change happen.
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Facilitated 50+ online events including four virtual conferences with thousands of attendees, community events on Zoom, and dozens of social media lives with industry leaders including Simon Sinek, Bernadette Jiwa, and Steven Pressfield.
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Hosted dozens of alumni storytelling events, which resulted in powerful video and written testimonials for the Akimbo workshops.
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Designed and executed social media strategy for Akimbo, altMBA, and Seth Godin's social accounts.
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Crafted marketing messaging for 15+ different email drip campaigns and the altMBA and Akimbo sales sites.
Workshop & Conference Creation
The Emerging Leaders Program is a 5-day workshop designed for young leaders, ages 16-25, looking to learn the real skills needed in the working world.
This program was something I had dreamt of creating for years after experiencing first-hand the lack of communities available to connect college-aged leaders from around the world who were eager to make a difference, learn through doing, and curious about pursuing non-traditional career paths. While I loved my college experience, I didn’t love the traditional education model of memorizing for the test, lecture-style classes, and the focus on hard skills, instead of soft skills.
When the pandemic hit in March 2020, many young leaders' plans for summer learning and work were canceled or shifted. I created this application-only, free program with Seth as a chance for students to learn together online. Between June 2020 and January 2021, 250 students from over 25 different countries graduated from this program. They came together online to embark on a journey to become better leaders and see things differently. In 5 short days, students shipped over 350 projects collectively and asked hundreds of new questions. The magic wasn't in the projects they were given or the breakout questions they were asked over Zoom. The magic came from how they showed up, led, made space for others, and shared their voices.
I led and managed the content, marketing, outreach, application process, training and managing of freelancers, and onboarding associated with this project. The whole program was hosted on Zoom and Slack.
After the sessions ended, dozens of students shared that they learned more about themselves and the world in these five days than in their entire academic careers. Click here to hear students share what they learned inside.
Sales site video sharing details for the January 2021 session.
[click music note on bottom right to listen]
The Real Skills Virtual Conference was created in late 2019 on the foundation that conferences shouldn’t be just about consuming information. Conferences should be about doing, choosing to make a change, and connecting with others. This Zoom-hosted conference redefined what the word ‘conference’ meant by focusing the entire two hours on the attendees and their work, instead of speakers. It is all about participating. Attendees leave with a path forward, with new insights and real-time feedback from other leaders from around the world. We've had thousands of people join us.
After running dozens of online month-long workshops through Akimbo, we had seen the power of learning in community, and wanted to create a low-cost, low-commitment opportunity for folks curious to experience the Akimbo way of learning first-hand.
I played a key role in the creation of this conference since our very first whiteboard session in the office when this idea came to life. I developed the content, trained coaches, hosted the sessions, and led the video creation, customer support, marketing, and copywriting.
After running a beta in late 2019, we launched the conference publicly in January 2020 and ran three conferences that year.
A quick clip from the beginning of the forth session in October 2020 after we had three Akimbo alumni musicians
perform live to kick off the conference.
Visual representation of all attendees from the January 2020 conference. We had to "hack" Zoom to make this one work with so many attendees (happy to share more!).
Additional Facilitated Events & Conversations
I have facilitated 50+ online events including four virtual conferences with thousands of attendees, community events, and dozens of social media lives with industry leaders including Simon Sinek, Bernadette Jiwa, Steven Pressfield, Sarah Jones, Natalie Nixon, Ramon Ray, and Alexandra DiPalma.
In May 2020, I facilitated The Leadership Circle, an action-packed, highly interactive Zoom workshop for Growth Faculty members, a group of global business thinkers and leaders. During the session, attendees engaged with each other in small breakout rooms, discussing deep questions, and then came back to reflect in a big group through different “chat waterfall” and off-mute exercises.
Quick clips from live social media conversations with Simon Sinek, Bernadette Jiwa, Sarah Jones, & Alex DiPalma.
[click the music note in the bottom right to listen]
You can find the full conversations at facebook.com/akimboworkshops.
Storytelling & Marketing
Powerful stories can really make a difference for folks on the fence about taking an Akimbo workshop. In 2020, I designed a new method for collecting feedback and testimonials from our customers that was high-touch and reflected the very human nature of how we communicated with customers at Akimbo. I led the collection, synthesis, and response for customer feedback. I presented ideas to the internal team for how to move forward to improve the customer experience, generate new business leads, and make new branding decisions to reflect key learnings. As part of this initiative, I hosted over a dozen Zoom calls with alumni to connect in small groups and hear the difference the Akimbo workshops made in their lives and work. These calls resulted in videos like this and this and the continuous scroll of the alumni insights pages.
In addition to leading the copywriting of Akimbo's marketing emails and sales sites, I managed the content creation and content calendar for Akimbo, altMBA, and Seth's social media pages. When the company transitioned into new ownership in late 2020, I led the rebranding of Akimbo on these pages, including new messaging and graphics.