A Few Notes on Work
- 18 hours ago
- 4 min read
A Few Notes on Work, After Finally Slowing Down for a Moment
A couple weeks ago, my family and I spent a long weekend in the Bahamas. It was warm, quiet, and—perhaps most notably—I left my computer at home and kept my phone locked in the hotel safe for most of the day.
That may not sound remarkable, but for someone who spends a lot of time moving between dashboards, content calendars, fundraising campaigns, and marketing infrastructure, it felt like a small experiment in stillness.
It also created the rare opportunity to think about work without actively doing it.
Professionally, most of my time and energy continues to center around my role as Director of Marketing at Move For Hunger, a national nonprofit focused on reducing food waste and fighting hunger by mobilizing transportation networks. The organization sits at an unusual intersection of logistics, corporate partnerships, and social impact, and the marketing work reflects that complexity.
Over the past six months, much of my focus has been rebuilding the marketing function into something more structured and measurable—connecting storytelling with real operational outcomes. That has meant establishing clearer campaign frameworks, strengthening our digital infrastructure, and aligning marketing efforts with organizational OKRs. I have also been fortunate to be able to add to my marketing team.
One of the more tangible outcomes came at the end of 2025. Our marketing and development teams made a concerted push to strengthen online fundraising during the fourth quarter, historically the most important time of year for nonprofit giving. Through coordinated email campaigns, improved landing pages, and more consistent messaging across digital channels, we raised more funds online in Q4 2025 than the previous year’s total online fundraising combined.
For a nonprofit whose work ultimately translates into meals delivered to communities, that kind of growth isn’t just a marketing statistic—it represents real impact.
Beyond fundraising, we’ve also continued expanding awareness through events and partnerships. Large-scale activations like our Music City Drop in Nashville and other industry-focused initiatives help introduce the organization to new audiences while reinforcing relationships with the moving and relocation companies that make our work possible. We also got to ring the closing bell at the NASDAQ on Christmas Eve—though I wasn't physically there, I know that experience meant a lot to our team.
The end result of those efforts shows up in the numbers that matter most: more food recovered, more meals delivered, and stronger national awareness of the role the transportation industry can play in addressing food insecurity.
At the same time, I’ve continued to keep Raido Consultancy, my small consulting practice, quietly active in the background. I’ve always believed there’s value in maintaining a space where I can work more directly with organizations that need strategic marketing leadership but may not be in a position to hire a full-time executive.
After wrapping up a couple of project early last year, that work has recently taken the form of serving as a Fractional CMO for The Better You Institute, a trauma-informed therapy practice licensed in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Florida.
The role happens mostly in the margins of the day (early mornings, evenings, weekends), but it’s a space I’ve wanted to contribute to for some time. Mental health and trauma-informed care are areas I’ve supported from afar for years, and the opportunity to apply my marketing background to that work felt meaningful in a different way than traditional consulting.
My first priority there has been simple: understand the current state of things. That meant auditing their marketing infrastructure, evaluating how prospective clients find and interact with the organization online, and identifying where the biggest opportunities for improvement exist.
From there, the work has focused on building momentum in a few practical areas:
Increasing social media engagement and consistency
Improving website SEO and AI search visibility so the right people can find the practice when they need it
Strengthening lead generation pathways and contact forms
Gradually improving lead-to-client conversion rates month over month
None of that work is especially glamorous. It’s mostly systems, messaging clarity, and incremental improvements that compound over time. But in a field like therapy, where people often reach out at vulnerable moments, getting those details right matters.
In a strange way, the two roles complement each other.
Move For Hunger operates at national scale, coordinating logistics networks and large corporate partnerships. The Better You Institute operates on a human scale, one conversation and one client relationship at a time. Both require careful communication, trust, and systems that quietly work in the background.
And both remind me that marketing, when it’s done well, is less about promotion than about connection.
Coming back from that short vacation sun-kissed, a bit more relaxed, and briefly disconnected from the usual constant flow of notifications, I found myself thinking about how unusual it is to have work that sits across those two worlds.
One focused on moving millions of pounds of food to people who need it.The other focused on helping individuals move through their own internal struggles.
The tools may be similar...strategy, messaging, digital infrastructure...but the outcomes are measured in very different ways.
For now, the balance works.
Most days still revolve around the work at Move For Hunger and the ongoing effort to grow its reach and impact. But having the ability to keep Raido Consultancy and my own personal consulting skills alive in a smaller way—and to contribute to the work being done at The Better You Institute—has been a welcome reminder that meaningful work doesn’t always need to fit neatly into one lane.
And if nothing else, the Bahamas experiment proved something useful.
The world continues spinning just fine when your device stays in a safe for a few hours.
