Writing Nature's Story

Visitation is the key to preservation. At least that's what modern conseravtion's founding father believed. But how do you get people to fall in love with a place that's remote, rugged, and can't speak for itself? You use words.

As a writer for Backcountry, I have the unique opportunity to encourage all to enjoy the outdoors. My work includes promotional sales, social media content, essays, articles, product names, and anything else my team might come up with.

Click here for a full sample of my work

Black Friday, Cyber Monday, & Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday are simply the biggest days in any retailer's year. In 2019, I was assigned as Backcountry's writer for all assets relating to the three days, Pre-Cyber, and Post-Cyber sales. This included site assets, ~40 promotional emails, social content, and any extra copy requests. Over these three weeks, Backcountry made hundreds of thousands of sales and profited in the tens of millions.

Holiday Gift Guide
Each winter, Backcountry creates a dedicated guide to all products and pursuits winter. As an industry-leading destination for skiing, snowboarding, and winter sports products, it's our pleasure to show off our expertise. This campaign had a dozen emails, site assets, site experience, and social pieces in association.

Summer Gear Guide
Like the annual Gift Guide, Backcountry also releases an annual Summer Gear Guide. This anticipated guide is a collection of the year's top gear in hiking, climbing, biking, and camping. Each pursuit has dozens of products that are individually chosen by our testing team.

Individual Campaigns
Throughout the year, Backcountry indexes into niche pursuit and sale opportunities--from running, rainwear , and sleeping systems to ski and snowboard selects. Deliverables change daily, and it's my job to connect with the customer regardless of request.

The Rest of My Story

After graduating from Bloomsburg University with a degree in Marketing, I pursued an internship with the Greater Houston Partnership, in Houston, Texas. I was determined to take advantage of an opportunity, and promptly moved to the Lone Star State.

What started as an internship with the membership department stemmed into 3 years of experience in advocacy and policy. I was offered a full-time position in the Public Policy Department.

Public Policy

The Greater Houston Partnership is a leading chamber of commerce in Texas, headquartered from downtown Houston. The Partnership strives to make Houston the best place to live, work, and build a business. In the Policy department, we lead several policy committees comprised of business leaders, elected officials (local, state, and federal), and industry experts, to tackle the unique challenges of the city and state.

As coordinator, I planned and prepared meetings for the Education, Transportation, Energy, Environmental, Health Care, and Quality of Life committees. Due to the diversity of industries, I had a first hand account of challenges and solutions that faced every sector of the city.

Advocacy

Apart from committee work, I took on additional research and advocacy projects. Some of the projects include:

Hurricane Harvey resilience and rebuilding efforts
Directly after the record breaking storm, our team rushed to evaluate the total cost of recovery projects and determined the long term impacts to the city and state. Our findings became the basis for an official Federal Aid request for over $60 billion.

Public Education voter campaigns
After confusing ballot language left the voters lost I was involved in implementing a successful local outreach campaign to educate citizens of Houston. The proposition in question was to reverse a previous decision set to deny funding for a public education finance issue. Refusal to meet the payment obligation would have caused $17 billion of taxable property to be annexed for another school district. The final vote was a resounding success.

‘Bathroom Bill’
After a unprecedented political play from the governor . Our team reconciled with business leaders in industries throughout Houston to champion opposition to SB6, a Senate Bill aimed to limit the use of public bathrooms to biological sex, taking liberties from a minority group, as well as costing an estimated $3.7 billion loss to the state in corporate recrimination.

Advertising

After three years, a Super Bowl, a Super Hurricane, and a World Series, it was time to return to the Keystone state. Wishing to pursue a new career, I accepted an Account Management Apprenticeship with the Karma Agency.

During the Apprenticeship, I worked with a diverse group of high-profile clients within the advertising arena. I managed projects from conception to completion, balancing both lifestyle and cultural clients, including; Nike, Columbia, The New York Philharmonic, University of Virginia, and the Philadelphia Convention & Visitors Bureau.

Nike - I worked with the APLA (Asia Pacific Latin America) Nike team to produce a constant stream of .com and email assets. Language, technology, culture, and holidays were all regular barriers that needed to be considered for every execution.

New York Phil - Our team was responsible for most of the promotional material throughout the 18/19 season. We began with the announcement of the new conductor at the beginning of the year, and worked through multiple campaigns for the distinguished organization.

PHLCVB - What’s better than promoting your favorite city? We worked the with PHLCVB and their partners to put Philly’s best foot forward to promote visitation and convention services. Projects ranged from one-sheeters to videos.

Ghost Robotics - Shifting from advertising to marketing, I joined the robotics start-up company Ghost Robotics as a consultant in 2019 to help push their new brand into the highly diversified military and industrial sectors. Acting as content curator and technical writer, I contintue to work with Ghost on everything robots.

Personal Projects

Everyone should have a passion project that compliments their career. Mine is the creation, curation, and promotion of Switchbacks. Switchbacks is a website dedicated to wilderness backpacking, conservation, and the promotion of lesser-known wilderness areas.

I use the website as a playground where my photography, editing, writing, social media, SEO, and media analytics skills can develop and grow. Addtionally, I use SB to practice my CMS, and sometimes my HTML chops. You can see the growth in the site simply by comparing it to the original idea, Willingness to Wander.

When I'm not working on Switcbacks, I like to keep myself busy by playing guitar, planning my next backpacking trip, or writing about one I've just gotten back from.