Welcome

The Strategist on Call

MARKETING DIRECTION FOR ORGANIZATIONS THAT HAVE A TEAM BUT NO ONE SETTING THE COURSE.

Four months. Your team builds the marketing system. I set direction, work through the decisions with you, and make sure what your people build holds together. Then it's yours to run.

What the problem actually costs

Money spent on marketing with no way to say what it was for. A team that asks "what should we do" and gets a guess. Board meetings where marketing is the slide everyone moves past. Staff time lost to reinventing the plan every quarter. And the quieter cost: the sense that a capable organization should have figured this out by now.

You run an organization with more than $1 million in revenue or annual operating budget. There's a coordinator, a contractor, or a board member handling marketing. What there isn't is a strategist. So campaigns start from scratch, the newsletter and the social feed and the annual appeal don't sound like the same organization, and you approve things you don't fully believe in because there's no one to ask.

You've priced a full-time marketing director and decided against it. You've hired an agency before and ended up with deliverables nobody on staff could carry forward. You don't want another vendor. You want someone in the room who has run this before and will teach your team to run it without her.

Who this is for

Fifteen years in marketing, starting with eight years inside mid-sized nonprofit theaters where I marketed more than 300 events a year. Since 2019, Toombs Creative has worked with clients across more than 30 industries, most often building strategy that an in-house team then carried out.

Alongside that, I've spent years in development, raising more than $7 million through major gifts, sponsorships, and grants, including the major gifts phase of a $2.3 million capital campaign. I know how your money moves, how your board thinks, and what your staff can realistically carry.

I also built Marketing Mapped Out, software that walks small business owners through the same sequence a marketing department would run. The process in this engagement is the same one, adapted for an organization with a team.

MBA in Sustainable Innovation, University of Victoria. Based in Port Townsend, Washington. Sessions on Zoom, with in-person available in the Pacific Northwest.

Why Me

I'M READY

Weeks one and two. The strategy intensive.

One session a week, every week, with your marketing lead and whoever else needs to be there.

Each session is a decision or a build:

email program
content rhythm
campaign calendar
analytics that tell you whether it's working.

Your team does the work between sessions. I review, redirect, and answer the questions that come up when a plan meets reality. You get me between sessions for the decisions that can't wait.

AI inside your operations.

Most teams are already using AI tools on their own, one person at a time, with no shared way of working. I've brought these tools into nonprofits and arts organizations, through real resistance, and kept them in use after I left. Part of this engagement is setting up the repeatable workflows your team will actually keep: research, drafting, reporting, and making sense of what your data says.

Week sixteen. Handoff. A final session where your team walks me through the system, not the other way around. A written operating document that records what was decided, why, and how it runs.

From here your people run it.

Weeks three through sixteen. Weekly working sessions.

We start with your customer, your positioning, and your message, in that order, because every decision downstream depends on them. I run working sessions with you and the people who touch marketing. We put what you already have on the table (the audiences, the past campaigns, the numbers you trust and the ones you don't) and decide what the organization is saying, to whom, and why. You leave with a written strategy your team helped build and can explain without me.

What happens over four months

I'M READY

A marketing strategy your team built

I don't write your campaigns, design your assets, post for you, or manage your ads. If that's what you need, hire an agency, and I'll help you brief them well.

This engagement exists so your organization stops needing one.

What I Don't Do

A marketing strategy your team built and understands. A working system for email, content, campaigns, and reporting that runs on a calendar, not on inspiration. Repeatable AI workflows your staff use every week.

A written record of every decision so the next hire or the next board member can pick it up. And a marketing lead who has spent four months making decisions alongside a strategist and is ready to make them alone.

What You Walk Away With

I'M READY

$25,000 for four months

I take a small number of engagements at a time so every client gets a weekly session and access between them.

If you're planning against a fiscal year or a campaign season, say so on the call and we'll work back from that date.

Availability

$25,000 for four months, paid in four monthly payments of $6,250.

For context, a full-time marketing director at this level costs well over $100,000 a year before benefits, and fractional marketing leadership is commonly priced between $8,000 and $22,000 per month.

This engagement is built so that at the end of it, you don't need either.

Investment

I'M READY

Do you work with for-profit companies too?
Yes. The buyer is any organization at this size without a strategist on staff. The process is the same.

What happens after the four months?

You run it. Some clients ask for a quarterly check-in afterward. That's available and never required, or necessary.

Our marketing person is part-time. Is that enough?
Usually, yes. What matters is that someone on staff owns the work between sessions and has the authority to act. We'll confirm that on the call.

Can our board or executive director sit in?

Yes, and for the strategy intensive I'd ask that the executive director or CEO be there. Direction gets set at that level.

What if we're mid-campaign or mid-fiscal-year?

We start where you are. The intensive uses what's already in motion rather than pausing it.

CONTACT ALEX