When lockdown began, many arts groups scrambled to establish digital presence from nothing. Young@Heart pivoted instantly, leveraging infrastructure I'd built over nine years.

When hired in 2011, Young@Heart had zero social media. For 12 of my 14 years there, I served as the organization's sole operations leader for all technical, digital, and marketing systems. I built their Facebook and YouTube pages from scratch to 44,000+ followers and 8M views—creating a distribution platform that enabled immediate pandemic response. In 2017, I designed and built their website—replacing an antiquated one with a comprehensive hub driving ticket sales, donations, and fan engagement that proved essential when national attention arrived.

This wasn't luck. This was infrastructure compounding over time.

But that foundation was only part of the story. Over 14 years as lead contract negotiator, I booked and advanced 132 concerts and 35 tours worldwide—including negotiating Young@Heart’s $200,000-grossing E*Trade Super Bowl commercial with MullenLowe. Executive Director Bob Cilman and I co-produced 24 fundraising concerts at Northampton's Academy of Music Theatre, generating $800,000 in ticket sales, sponsorships, ads, merchandise, and donations. 

Before this model, Young@Heart performed benefits for other organizations. I advocated we stop competing with ourselves for limited local audience capacity and build our own revenue stream instead. Bob agreed—producing twice-yearly fundraising concerts became the organization's lifeblood. 

I managed the full production cycle: pitched and sold sponsorships, stewarded major sponsor relationships, drove ticket sales through social media and email marketing to our 8,000-subscriber list, and handled all payments. Beyond co-creating this concert model with Bob, I introduced crowdfunding to the organization, leading two campaigns and guiding two others, raising $150,000 while engaging thousands of new donors from all over the world, bringing them into our ecosystem.