Marketing for Help Main Street
Help Main Street is a volunteer organization driving revenue to local businesses during the Covid-19 crisis. Comprised of a small group of pro-bono startup founders, venture capitalists, and marketing professionals, we created an online map directory of more than 121,000 local businesses with links to their gift card, donation, and online ordering pages. We have been able to drive more than $516,000 to local businesses and have been featured in national media such as the Wall Street Journal, BuzzFeed, and Axios, among many others.
I led marketing for the organization, including content strategy for HMS blog content series, copywriting of all blog posts and press releases, email marketing efforts, and coordination of product marketing for new versions of the website.
Key Results
More than 81,000 site visits in the site’s first three months (March–June 2020)
Efforts generated an estimated $516,000 in cash flow to local businesses
Content Strategy & Creation
Voices from Main Street
Voices from Main Street is a Medium blog series published by Help Main Street. It features interviews with local business owners across the U.S. and highlights their creative, unique solutions to weathering the Covid-19 crisis. I proposed and created the series, conducted all interviews, prepared the interviews for publication, and promoted them via our social and email channels.
Tom Colicchio Interview
A highlight of my Voices from Main Street work was the opportunity to interview Tom Colicchio, noted chef, entrepreneur, and independent restaurant advocate. In addition to my typical questions about how his restaurant group has adapted to the constraints of Covid-19, I also developed some strategic, in-depth questions to allow Colicchio to share his expertise on how the crisis might reshape the food industry.
Feature release blog post
For its fourth release, Help Main Street added the ability to more easily find black-owned local businesses on the site. I wrote a blog post announcing this release, but also speaking to the Black Lives Matter movement. The goal of the post—and the release itself—was to reaffirm the immense contributions that black business owners make to local economies and American entrepreneurship.
At a time when the economic fallout from Covid-19 was dire for many local businesses, I felt that Help Main Street would benefit from content that was as positive and inspirational as its mission. I created Voices from Main Street to be helpful and contribute value on several different levels: to promote and celebrate businesses that were still figuring out a way to keep their doors open even during a shutdown, and to use their stories to inspire other business owners to adapt. I was delighted to find that there was no shortage of good news even in rough times, and it was my honor to help surface it to a larger audience.