Welcome to the latest installment in our series on the “Day in the Life” of nonprofit communicators! This series lets you describe your workday in your own words.
Pam Georgiana, MBA is the Vice President of Engagement for Lutheran Social Services in Ohio. She is a marketing strategy professional with more than 20 years of experience in experiential and relational marketing, communications, and branding. She is passionate about identifying trends, brainstorming innovative engagement ideas and creative brand messaging and turning them into impactful strategies that change the world.
And this is her typical day:
Before 8:00 a.m. – The alarm goes off at 6 a.m. but it’s usually 6:30 by the time I get out of bed. The first thing I do is get on the treadmill. While I work out, I check my personal Twitter feed and email. I also watch MSNBC to catch up on news.
Once I’m done working out, I make coffee and get dressed. I usually make and take both breakfast and lunch to the office every day but coffee is a must if I want to actually make it out the door. Most days, I try to leave home before 8 a.m.
8:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m – Once I get to the office, I’ll grab more coffee and my breakfast as I log in for the day. I skim my email and set priorities in my head as to how and when to respond to them.
I open Tweetdeck and review our four Twitter feeds and our tracked hashtags and keywords. I also review our Instagram account. I have a very small team so we divide up the social media duties.
I am in charge of Twitter and Instagram. I schedule posts when I can but I’ve found that if I can respond to something happening in the moment, engagement is better. It’s a struggle to keep up.
I’ll try to post to Instagram and at least one Twitter account every morning and then comment, like, retweet and share other posts throughout the day whenever I can.
I also check in with the Director of Communications to see if there are any fires that needed put out or issues that I need to bring into my morning meeting.
10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. – Every other Tuesday, we have a Cabinet meeting from 10am to noon. In these meetings, the VPs, COO, and CEO meet to discuss strategic planning, budget issues, operational issues and other important topics that affect our organization.
We also have the opportunity to keep each other in the loop on projects and opportunities that we are working on. I’ve learned that communication is key to building good relationships among departments and peers. The more open we are, the better buy-in we receive especially when we propose projects that have never been done before.
For example, my team has been researching an online family communication portal for our healthcare facilities and a texting platform in which to communicate to donors and volunteers. We are going to need the buy-in of other teams to make this happen so I’ve been providing updates all along the way so that the decision will be easier when we are ready to make it.
12:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m – I usually eat lunch at my desk while I tackle emails. I also look at Google Analytics to check web traffic. We are working hard on our SEO strategy so I am really focused on our web traffic, session duration and other acquisition metrics.
I also check our Adwords campaigns. I try to put aside a couple of hours each month to more thoroughly review each Adwords account and make changes on keywords, bids, ad copy, etc but I’ll spot check as I can most days.
2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m – I meet with our SEO consultant and the Director of Communication to talk about the next steps in our SEO strategy. We don’t have the ability to hire a staff digital marketing coordinator so we have been muddling through the process of improving our SEO with the help of our consultant. It’s a daunting task for a website as large as ours but I hope we are making progress.
I have a free hour to work on my dashboards. Every two weeks, I send out a dashboard of our critical marketing metrics for our healthcare facilities to Cabinet and program directors. This dashboard includes census data, pipeline data, lead sources, marketing efforts and key marketing funnel ratios.
Every facility is scored against a benchmark and a budget goal. This data must be gathered via email and shared spreadsheets and then I build the dashboards in Excel. Someday I hope that we will be able to do this via a platform like Tableau but we are not there yet.
After 4:00 p.m. – I usually don’t leave the office until after 6 p.m. I tend to get a lot of small jobs done in the quiet of that last hour when everyone has gone. I answer the last couple of emails, send out my finished dashboards, and send out a couple more meeting requests before I leave for home.
Once home, I put on my freelance hat. I’ve been a freelance marketing consultant and copywriter for about 5 years. I enjoy the work and it helps me build my retirement fund.
I make dinner and then do research for clients or write until about 9 p.m. and then log off. I’ll read or watch tv until bedtime.
Thanks for sharing your day, Pam!
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