Managing 200+ Initiatives Across 70+ Employees

Girl Scouts of Northern Illinois | National Nonprofit | 2013–2018

The Organization

Girl Scouts of Northern Illinois is a regional council of one of the largest youth development organizations in the country — serving thousands of girls across a wide geographic area with programming, volunteer management, and community engagement at scale.

The work is complex in the way that mission-driven organizations often are: high stakes, limited resources, multiple stakeholder groups with different needs, and a constant tension between the strategic vision leadership is trying to execute and the day-to-day reality of the people responsible for delivering it.

I spent five and a half years here in progressively senior roles — moving from Multimedia Manager through Marketing and Communications into Director of Girl Experience. Each role expanded the scope of what I was responsible for building.

The Problem

When I was Digital Marketing and Project Manager, I was sitting at the intersection of a fundamental organizational challenge: how do you translate a strategic vision into consistent program experiences when you have 70+ employees, 200+ active initiatives, and teams that are largely operating in silos?

The day-to-day problems were structural:

There was no shared system for managing the volume of work. Two hundred marketing initiatives across seventy-plus employees is not a project management problem — it's an infrastructure problem. Without a system that gave everyone visibility into what was happening, work was being duplicated, priorities were competing, and nothing had a reliable way of getting done on time.

Teams weren't connected to outcomes. People knew what they were doing but not always why it mattered in the context of the larger strategy. The link between daily work and strategic goals was implicit at best — which meant progress was hard to measure and accountability was hard to maintain.

Cross-functional collaboration wasn't working. Departments were operating as isolated units. The marketing team didn't know what the program team needed. The program team didn't know what communications was building. Everyone was working hard and the organization wasn't getting the benefit of all that effort because the work wasn't coordinated.

Technology transitions were creating disruption. A Salesforce implementation was underway across multiple councils — and without structured training and adoption systems, the transition was creating more confusion than clarity for the staff responsible for using it.

The Work

I built the infrastructure that connected the work to the strategy.

The first priority was visibility. I created a system to manage 200+ marketing initiatives that gave the organization a shared view of what was happening, who was responsible for what, and where things stood at any given moment. This wasn't just project tracking — it was the foundation for accountability across a large, distributed team.

I designed a KPI framework that linked daily operations to strategic outcomes. For the first time, the organization had a way to measure whether the work people were doing was actually moving the strategy forward — and to have honest conversations when it wasn't.

I led Salesforce transition training across multiple councils — designing adoption systems that supported 20+ staff in learning and actually using the platform consistently. The goal wasn't just training. It was building the systems around the training that would make adoption stick.

I built cross-functional collaboration models that broke down the silos between teams — creating workflows that made it possible for departments to work together rather than alongside each other. When marketing knew what programs needed and programs knew what communications was building, the organization started moving with a coherence it hadn't had before.

And I created frameworks that turned strategic goals into consistent program experiences — ensuring that what leadership intended at the top was actually what girls and families experienced at the program level.

The Outcome

The organization gained the infrastructure to manage complexity at scale — without losing the quality of the mission-driven work at the center of everything it did. Teams that had been operating in isolation started operating in alignment. Strategic goals that had lived in leadership documents started showing up in the daily work of the people responsible for delivering them.