Facing History & Ourselves' 40th anniversary was the organization's first campaign with significant public visibility — street-level presence, broad digital reach, and audiences well beyond its established educator base. The stakes were high and the internal challenge was real: how to come up with a eye-catching approach for an institution whose mission is genuinely complex and whose culture rightly resists oversimplification.
Challenge
Guide a mission-driven organization toward a campaign platform simple enough for new audiences — without sacrificing the depth that made the mission credible to those who knew it best.
Land on a slogan and visual system flexible enough to operate at two registers: clear and accessible for the uninitiated, rich enough to carry the organization's full story for long-time supporters and educators.
Take a complex agency engagement through to real-world execution — the implementation and governance work that determines whether a campaign actually lands.
My Role
Helped guide the internal process of arriving at a campaign platform — sustained, collaborative work that required as much organizational navigation as creative judgment.
Defined the flexibility requirements for the campaign system so that messaging could scale from a streetlight banner to a full annual report without losing coherence.
Drove execution from agency handoff through rollout across digital, print, and environmental channels — the operational leadership that turns strategy into presence
Impact
The campaign doubled the organization's outreach to educators, surpassed fundraising goals, and gave Facing History a public presence it had never had before — built on a platform that honored the complexity of the mission while making it legible to new audiences.
Posters for events & offices
Streetlight banners
Annual Report