I’m the lead digital marketing specialist at GreenHaven Interactive, a digital marketing agency in the Puget Sound area, where I handle the training, the systems, and the quality checks for our content team and help keep client projects moving between the writers, developers, designers, and ad specialists. Before that I built a national nonprofit’s first paid membership program, managed a public engagement project for the Wing Luke Museum, and finished a master’s in communication at the University of Washington. I’m working toward program and project management, and I’ve come to see every one of those jobs as practice for it.
I notice the gap and fill it with something the next person can use. When a new writer’s keyword list showed me that our whole method lived in my head, I stopped what I was doing and wrote it down as a reference, so the next new hire wouldn’t have to guess.
I build systems that don’t need me in them. The client-request intake I set up at GreenHaven reads each request, files it on the right client’s board, and assigns it to the right person without anyone touching it. My favorite part is that a teammate can add a new client without asking me.
I take the people part seriously. I hold one-on-ones with the six specialists on our team, and my end of every meeting turns into a dated to-do list that I work through before we meet again. I learned early on that people trust you when you do what you said you would, and I try to be that person for my team.
I write it down. Runbooks, protocols, workflow diagrams, training. A program I’ve helped build should keep running after I hand it off, so to me the documentation and the teaching are part of the job, not extra credit.
Thanks for reading this far. I’m in Seattle and looking for program or project coordination work, full-time or contract, with an organization that runs programs for people: memberships, public engagement, education, content, or community work. The roles I do best in put me in the middle of a few groups who need to stay in step, with systems to build and a plan that has to hold up once real people are following it. If that sounds like your team, I’d love to hear from you. Email is the fastest way to reach me.
kyle@kylewickline.com