About

Twenty years in marketing. Six at the CMO level. The work found me.

I spent the first twenty years of my career in-house. Six of them at the chief marketing officer level, leading strategy, brand, and performance across organizations that ranged from established professional services firms to mission-driven institutions.

I wasn't planning to start a consulting practice. When I stepped out of my last in-house CMO role, a former client reached out and asked if I'd take on a strategic part-time engagement. The work was real, the fit was clear, and I said yes. A second opportunity followed. Chapman is what came from saying yes to the right kind of work.

What I do now is what I've always done: bring marketing into disciplined alignment with how the business actually grows. The difference is who I do it for. Instead of one organization, I work with two or three at a time, each one ready for senior marketing leadership but not in a position to add a full-time CMO to payroll.

I'm based in Connecticut and work with organizations across New England.

From the work

For years our enrollment marketing felt like a series of one-off projects that never added up to anything cohesive. Jennifer was the first person who looked at it the way I look at the school. A whole system that has to make sense to families, faculty, and donors at the same time. The work she did with us on positioning gave us a frame I still use when we evaluate any new initiative. She doesn't tell you what to do. She names what's actually happening and lets you choose.

Head of School, Independent School, New England

We brought Jennifer in to redesign our annual gala invitation and ended up rethinking how the whole event positioned itself to our community. The piece she produced was beautiful. The reason we kept working with her after was the conversations that came with it. Most marketing people show up with a deliverable. Jennifer shows up with a question. The question is always the one we should have asked ourselves first.

Head of School, Independent School, New England
Selected work

A gala invitation, and the brand it ended up rebuilding

Independent School, New England

The situation

The school's annual gala was one of its largest fundraising events, drawing established families, board members, and prospective donors. The prior year's collateral had used a generic event-design template that didn't reflect the school's actual character. Attendance had plateaued. Giving at the event had softened.

The brief

Redesign the invitation suite to feel like a piece of the school, not a generic event.

What we found instead

Before designing anything, we audited every customer-facing surface the school used during fundraising season. Web, email, the annual report, the prior-year gala collateral. Three distinct visual identities and four different ways the school described itself were running side by side, depending on which staff member produced the piece. The gala collateral wasn't underperforming because it was poorly designed. It was underperforming because it didn't connect to anything else the family saw all year.

The work

We aligned the brand across the surfaces first. Then we designed the invitation, response card, day-of program, and signage as a coordinated suite, alongside a one-page brand brief the school could use for every future piece without going back to a designer for the fundamentals.

The outcome

  • Attendance: [X]% above the prior year
  • Gala giving total: $[Y] above prior year
  • The brand brief has been in use across [Z] subsequent projects

What it taught us

Sometimes the request is "design this thing." The leverage is in asking what this thing needs to be part of.