Past Work

When I joined Yoga Alliance, retention was not something the organization had systems for yet. There was no strategy, no onboarding infrastructure, no tooling, and no reliable data to work from. We did not have a baseline retention rate, let alone a way to track changes over time.

That is where we started. Before anything else, I led the work to calculate our retention rate for the first time and put data capture mechanisms in place that would actually let us monitor it going forward. You cannot improve what you cannot measure, and until that point, we were not measuring.

From there, the foundation had to come before the strategy. Our existing email infrastructure could not support the kind of segmented, lifecycle-based communication retention work requires. I led a full transition to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, including the technical implementation, building out the data extensions, and developing the content and journeys needed to communicate meaningfully with current members at different stages of their lifecycle.

With the data and the tooling in place, we built three interlocking systems: a personalized onboarding sequence to drive early activation in the critical first 90 days; ongoing campaigns tailored to member behavior and lifecycle stage; and a feedback loop to continuously surface what was and was not working. Every month we tracked total member volume and retention rates, and tied those changes back to the email journeys to confirm they were actually the driver.

The result was structural as much as numerical. Retention climbed 8 points, from 73.6% to 81.4%. But the more lasting outcome is that Yoga Alliance now has a retention function, with the data infrastructure, tooling, and measurement cadence to sustain and build on that progress, where none of that existed before.

When Yoga Alliance decided to overhaul its brand, the website was the most consequential expression of that change and the least defined. The organization had committed to a new direction, but what that meant for the site's content, navigation, and user experience was still an open question.

I started with the data we already had. Analytics pointed clearly to where prospective members were dropping off in the sign-up process, and which pages about our credential offerings were generating confusion rather than confidence. That gave us a concrete brief: make the value of membership easier to understand, and the path to joining easier to complete.

From there I developed the content and UX strategy, drawing on both the analytics and my background with SaaS and subscription businesses where onboarding friction is a well understood problem. I translated that strategy into a clear brief for an outside agency, giving them the direction they needed to move quickly without sacrificing quality.

Throughout the process I reviewed and refined copy and designs, keeping the work grounded in the original strategic intent. I then led the approval process with senior leadership, presenting the approach, layout, and content for sign-off at each stage.

The result was a site that reflected the new brand and worked harder for the people using it: cleaner navigation, clearer credential content, and a sign-up flow designed around where real users had been getting stuck.

Yoga Alliance had strong opinions about who its members were and what they needed. What it did not have was evidence. The last real look at the industry was the 2016 Yoga in America survey, limited to the United States, and the organization was making product decisions for a global membership on the strength of that and little else.

Yoga in the World was the answer: a study designed to benchmark the practice and the profession across ten countries rather than one, and to name the barriers keeping people out of it. Working with research partner Sensis, we surveyed practitioners and the general public in the United States, United Kingdom, Brazil, Germany, Chile, China, India, Kenya, Nigeria, and the United Arab Emirates, and added teachers and studio owners in the four markets where the professional side of yoga was most established. More than 13,000 people participated, making it the largest research effort the industry had ever undertaken.

The quantitative work only answered half the question. To understand why people who were interested in yoga were not practicing it, we ran eleven focus groups in the United States with Asian, Black, and Hispanic participants, both practitioners and non-practitioners, fielded by Ebony Marketing Systems. That qualitative layer is where the access barriers actually surfaced.

The study design mattered as much as its scale. We retained a set of questions from the earlier surveys so the results would be comparable over time rather than a one-off snapshot, and added demographic questions the organization had never asked, specifically to determine who does and does not have access to the practice.

The findings reframed how the organization understood its own market. The reason people start practicing had shifted since 2016, from flexibility to stress relief and mental health, consistently across most of the countries surveyed. And the data made visible a large population engaged with yoga who had no interest in a teaching credential, which was the only product the organization sold. That finding drove the addition of a non-credential membership tier, a meaningful product expansion and the first time member research directly changed what Yoga Alliance offered.

The study was published as a global executive summary plus individual country reports, and picked up by Yoga Journal and the trade press. It is now the baseline for an ongoing series rather than a single report.

Young adult men aged 18 to 30 are one of the hardest audiences to reach with a public health message. They are skeptical of anything that feels like a PSA, they do not watch traditional media, and they are extremely good at tuning out content that was not made for them.

Our client, the Foundation for a Healthier West Orange, needed to reduce binge drinking and drunk driving in exactly this population, but the conventional public health playbook was not going to work on this audience.

We started with research, focused on two questions: what message would actually move this audience, and what format would reach them where they already spent time online. The research pointed in a clear direction. This group was deeply engaged with Adult Swim and South Park: animation built around irreverent humor, self-aware writing, and characters who felt like peers rather than authority figures.

That insight became the creative concept. I developed the idea for Drunken Rewind, an animated series built specifically around the aesthetic and sensibility this audience already loved, and wrote the first two episodes. Rather than delivering health messages didactically, the series embedded harm reduction content into humor the audience would actually seek out and share. A new episode was released monthly over three years, each one carrying between three and six evidence-based messages about drinking.

The results demonstrated genuine behavior change, not just reach. The campaign achieved a 73% average viewer retention rate across its one to three minute YouTube episodes, exceptional for any content and nearly unheard of for public health. By year three, 63% of the target audience was aware of Drunken Rewind. Among viewers who had seen the campaign, 90% found the content relatable, 90% felt it provided useful information, and 87% said it made them more aware of their own drinking habits. From baseline to year two, the share of respondents who perceived daily drinking as risky nearly doubled, from 31% to 60%. Viewers aware of the campaign also showed significantly higher intentions to drink less often and in smaller amounts than those who had not seen it.