Interview

When and how did you get your start in marketing?

I started my career doing fundraising for nonprofit organizations. Eventually, I landed a job at Khan Academy, a large ed-tech nonprofit. Fundraising looked different there than at the older, more traditional nonprofits I’d worked at previously. At Khan Academy, it meant sending emails to tens of millions of users asking for grassroots donations, optimizing landing pages, and A/B testing our messaging across a number of platforms. From there, I was well primed to pursue other roles in digital marketing and campaign optimization.

What are some of your career highlights or campaigns that you’re especially proud of?

I’ve always been compelled to work in the social impact sphere. My work has spanned nonprofits, political campaigns, and tech companies like Calm that provide meaningful impact to people’s everyday lives. I’m certainly most proud of surviving the stress and intensity of working on a 2020 presidential campaign (Elizabeth Warren for President), managing all digital channel optimization from her HQ in Boston.

What are some Iterable features that have made your job easier? Or have been game-changers for yourself and your team?

Exit Rules in our workflows is a huge time-saver for complicated journeys where we’d like to stop people from progressing should they meet certain criteria (e.g. already converted, didn’t open last 3 touches, etc.). Previously, we’d use several Yes/No nodes to check for these conditions, making our journeys cluttered and increasing opportunity for error. Using Exit Rules lets us be sure we’re removing folks from journeys consistently.

What’s your long-term vision with Iterable?

I’d like for Calm to better leverage the Catalog functionality so we can do more personalization of our recommendations to users. Ingesting data from our actual production database around session performance into the Catalog would allow us to then serve dynamic and regularly-refreshing recommendations to users.

As a consumer, what brings you joy from a brand’s outreach/communication?

I’m a big fan of timely and strategically executed campaigns, particularly over push, that reference real-life events to encourage me to take a certain action (e.g. “Order your favorite snacks now; the Super Bowl starts in 2 hours!”). I like knowing that real people behind the scenes are strategizing on these tactics and anticipating my needs, and I particularly love when they’re able to inject some humor or sass into these campaigns!

Besides Iterable, what are the other tools in your marketing toolkit that you can’t live without?

We use Amplitude for all of our reporting and data visualization needs, and I can’t imagine a world without it!

If you weren’t a marketer, what would you be?

Easy. Dog trainer. Don’t tempt me, though.

If you came with a warning label, what would it say? (ex: you’re a fast talker, you’re highly competitive, you talk about your dog a lot, etc.)

I’m going to be very distracted in any conversation if there’s an animal I could be petting within 100 feet of me.