national portrait gallery
As a social media team of one, I created and shaped campaign strategies, researched, produced, wrote, and scheduled original organic and paid content. With a yearly audience of over 2 million visitors and more than 390,000 online followers, the objective was to engage and educate audiences within a historical and portraiture-rich context.
2019-22 METRICS
Audience Growth: 197%+ increase
Instagram Engagement: 110%+ increase
Video Views: 62%+ increase (beginning in 2019, I reactivated our YouTube account and negotiated an increased budget to prioritize video content).
major Campaigns
2019 Portrait of a Nation Gala (Facebook partnership)
The Outwin 2019: American Portraiture Today
2021 Obama Portraits Tour + 2022 extension announcement
2022 Portrait of a Nation Gala
The 2019 portrait of a nation gala
The 2019 American Portrait Gala honored Frances Arnold, Jeffrey P. Bezos, Earth, Wind & Fire, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Indra Nooyi, and Anna Wintour. Presentations of the “Portrait of a Nation Prize” included Michelle Obama, France Córdova, James Corden, Alberto Ibargüen, Clive Davis, and Preston Bezos.
Goal: Raise awareness of the gala and its fundraising mission and set an engagement benchmark as the inaugural social media campaign for the event.
Strategy: As a priority for the board, I shaped messaging and content around the context of the gala: the honorees, commissioned portraits, accompanying exhibition, and the artists creating social-first content for a general audience deemphasizing the private nature of the event. We also partnered with Facebook who worked with us adjacently on social-first content with Facebook-selected influencers.
Result: Our inaugural social media gala campaign was a success and set the first benchmark for the 2022 Portrait of a Nation Gala.
Total Journalistic Social Media Reach: 2M
Total Shares on Social Media: 73K (compared to 26 in 2017’s gala) – an 711% increase
Total Social Posts (audience + NPG content): 8.2K (compared to 1.8K in 2017)
Total Impressions: 357M (compared to 197M in 2017) – an 80% increase
The honorees and presenters at the American Portrait Gala 2019 / Photo: Paul Morigi/Invision/AP
covid-19 museum response
I coordinated with our educational, programs, and curatorial departments to shape content for social media that reflected their work and engaged audiences.
Result: Engagement increase of 10%+ across all platforms.
I kicked off four new digital series as a direct result of the pandemic: