During my time at Housing Hope, I have led visual direction on multiple brand refreshes, new brand logos, new event series, social media content, fundraising initiatives, and much more. My marketing work and social media programming helped achieve record breaking results in multiple areas of the agency, with stand out accomplishments including all time high results from our premier fundraising gala and year-end digital campaign.

Each year, one of the primary responsibilities that our Resource Development Marketing and Communications department was responsible for is to produce multiple fundraising events throughout the calendar year, with the largest and most important being Stone Soup. Held in May at the Tulalip Resort in Washington, Stone Soup historically attracts 500+ attendees and raises vital funds for general operations and in development projects for the nonprofit. Taking six months to produce, this event annually required me to demonstrate and utilize my full range in technical skills across design, marketing, communications, event production, customer service, and video production.

Stone Soup 2025 (Marketing Specialist)

This year was my first year attending the event and was widely regarded by long time attendees as the best edition of the gala in our agencies history. As a team, the RDMC department debuted a new visual direction for Housing Hope at the event, and received overwhelming love and praise for where the brand was moving. I lead the visual direction and worked diligently to continue our new branding onward post event as well.

Stone Soup 2026 (Marketing & Communications Manager)

In February of 2026, just before my official 2-year anniversary with Housing Hope, I became the Marketing & Communications Manager and led direction on all event materials and communications for Stone Soup 2026. This included the 2026 visual direction, the event logo, sponsorship guides & sponsor branded promotional materials, ticket sale graphics, event wayfinding signage, foam boards, donation forms, parking guides, maps & directions, postcards, the event program, raffle marketing materials, VIP recognition tradeshow badges, table numbers, social media graphics and event countdowns, multiple blogs, multiple post-event videos and recaps, and other general event materials.

I handled the creation and design direction for the core event presentation, with over 70 slides, that were displayed throughout the event. My role during the event was to manage the digital elements of our event program while also coordinating photography, video, and audio from back-of-house. As a fun unique element for the 2026 program, we also designed special Housing Hope logo imprinted LED lightbulbs for an audience engagement moment during the event. These were a crowd favorite and created an amazing moment of discovery for those in attendance.

Results from my first year being the lead on Stone Soup 2026’s marketing and communications speak for themselves. We saw a 15% growth in total funds raised to $500,000, a 20% jump in total sponsorships with an 11% raise in sponsorship dollars, a record breaking year for ticket sales of 624 (a 5% increase from 2025), a doubling of raffle ticket sales, amazing views/reach metrics across our social media channels, and 30%+ open rates on email communications with click through rates topping out at 12%.

These successes came on top of having a 29% reduction in staff for our department directly before the 2026 campaign began, and resulted in the previous Marketing Manager leaving with their half a decade of institutional knowledge expertise. It was a daunting challenge to say the least, but I am so proud that our small dynamic team of 5 was not only able to overcome, but also exceeded expectations across the board. We received dozens of survey responses and word of mouth feedback from attendees, some of which have been attending Stone Soup for 15+ years, all saying how this event was the best produced smoothest, and most engaging edition of the event they have ever experienced.

As the Marketing & Communications Manager & Marketing Specialist, I have been in charge of the vast majority of social media communications. From when I was hired in 2024, I took Housing Hope from being in a general “maintenance mode” for most content, and achieved undeniable success across all trackable metrics. Certain results over a 12-month window showed upwards of 1100% increases at the top, with most metrics moving upwards at least 50%.

All of this work lead to the 2025 Year-End-Appeal campaign, where the groundwork allowed our department to see record follower increases and content interactions. This translated to an all time high fundraising result for the campaign.

During my time at Housing Hope, I was responsible for leading a refresh on key marketing materials such as brochures, the company website, and items for events. These were all distributed and used across Snohomish and King county to better communicate our nonprofit’s operations, drive new business, and increase agency awareness.

Additionally, I created multiple new or refreshed logos for the agency’s brands during my time. This included refreshed logos for Housing Hope and HopeWorks, with new logos being created for Kindred Kitchen, Pathbuilders, and President’s Circle.

Developing and maintaining a strong volunteer community allows NPOs to be more impactful in any given month with the limited resources available to them. When I was hired at Housing Hope the volunteer program was basically non-existent, and I saw this as an area of great opportunity that I could elevate for our agency. I was a part of the team that oversaw the hiring of a new Volunteer Manager, and once they were onboarded I began working closely with them to establish a new visual direction and approach for volunteer coordination and growth.

Over the coming months, I developed a new logo, added a new volunteer portal to the website, established monthly opportunity calendars, lead the visual direction for all marketing materials, created forms and flyers for general operations, and have continued to push for an increased visual excellence and visual identity for the program. In doing so, Housing Hope saw growth in our volunteer community to levels never achieved previously during it’s 40 years of history. When once we struggled to fill even a few volunteer opportunities, we have now reached the point where we are having to turn away volunteers.

We also expanded our relationships with many corporate volunteer groups, including Amazon, Ebay, MBAKS, and dozens of others.

One of Housing Hope’s departments and brands is HopeWorks. This department has seen a few iterations during my time with the company, but at its core HopeWorks provides support services, education, employment help, and job training for both residents and external applicants.

I led a brand refresh, including new primary logos, brand color updates, expanded Pathway visual identities, and a new dedicated section for HopeWorks on the HH website.

In 2026, the department saw an overhaul that refocused their efforts on job readiness and job training initiatives, and I was brought in to help provide a brand refresh, create new marketing materials that would be tools for staff with enrollment, and refresh their digital footprint.

During this process I created a new brochure, new marketing flyers, new job training pathway strip flyers, provided marketing strategy, developed a social media content plan, handled print orders, and other various tasks to support initiatives set by their director. I often had to develop materials from the ground up with minimal direction, but am very happy with the finished products that I was able to equip their staff with.

One of the larger projects that I was assigned to was the creation of a Housing Hope agency brand style guide. The goal was to document all brand colors, fonts, and logos in one place for use internally and to be able to send to vendors.

During my time at Housing Hope, I have been responsible for all print and digital marketing materials that our four social enterprises required. Each social enterprise required a unique approach to their marketing as each occupied a different industry or focus. I handled everything from print materials, to digital marketing, to packaging as needed for each.

The social enterprise that I did the most design and marketing work for was Kindred Kitchen. One part cafe, one part catering operation, one part culinary job training outlet, Kindred was at the heart of our HopeStation campus that featured the cafe along with affordable housing, and classrooms for job training programs.

I was tasked with giving the brand a refresh, developing new products and packaging, supporting the blossoming catering operations, and helping support events in the cafe space as well as feature the newly completed culinary kitchen, funded by The Gates Foundation.

Tomorrow’s Hope, our early childcare and development social enterprise, mostly required support with enrollment marketing and various other branded print materials. Additional work was completed for a capital campaign that will fund an upcoming expansion and new building.

Renew Home & Decor was the social enterprise focused on furniture and consignment, with job training programs built into the store’s general operations. As a traditional brick and mortal store, Renew required support for marketing campaigns and general store communications. Paid advertisements were run on the approved marketing budget, and we developed cross promotional opportunities with other Housing Hope brands, as well as external companies such as Epoch Design.