Shockoe Institute
content strategy / art direction / email marketing / social media / event communications
Shockoe Institute
Client
Build awareness, deepen engagement, and support the Shockoe Institute’s mission ahead of the launch of Expanding Freedom, a 10,000-square-foot permanent exhibit opening in April 2026.
Objective
The Challenge
The Shockoe Institute was a newly launched national organization navigating the challenge of building a new institution from the ground up. This meant defining new audiences, creating programming, and establishing a voice for a mission that demands both historical accuracy and emotional resonance.
The work needed to:
Build awareness and trust before the public opening
Turn complex, historically sensitive topics into accessible content
Maintain consistent voice and visuals across all channels
Create sustainable systems for ongoing content production
The Approach
To establish the Shockoe Institute as a trusted voice, I built a content ecosystem designed to educate, engage, and mobilize audiences. My approach centered on creating foundational systems across four areas:
Brand-Aligned Strategy: I developed messaging pillars and tone guidelines grounded in their mission, ensuring every piece of content reinforced a clear progression: learn, reflect, act.
Social Media Campaigns: I planned and wrote multi-month campaigns introducing exhibit themes, using structured storytelling to move audiences from awareness to reflection and participation.
Email & Newsletter Communications: I designed monthly newsletters and announcement emails that balanced narrative storytelling with clear calls-to-action, driving traffic and donations.
Event Communications: I created marketing asset packages for the "Shockoe Institute Presents" series, including emails, RSVP pages, and social posts that spotlighted featured artists and themes.
Deliverables
Content system: messaging framework, voice guidelines, and recurring story formats
Social toolkit: templates for series content, program promotion, and supporter engagement
Email toolkit: modular newsletter structure with repeatable content blocks
Event comms kit: promotional materials for before, during, and after the event
Asset library: curated visuals and layout promotional guidelines for brand consistency
Selected Campaigns
Expanding Freedom Premiere
Event · April 2026
The Expanding Freedom exhibit carried its own visual identity — a deeper, more formal palette rooted in dark burgundy and gold — distinct from the Shockoe Institute's broader brand. A key design challenge was creating premiere materials that felt cohesive with the exhibit without departing from the institution's established identity. I threaded the two together through consistent logo usage, shared typographic structure, and deliberate color transitions across touchpoints.
I designed the full suite of premiere materials: the formal printed invitation, event website, on-screen presentation slides, wayfinding signage, table tent donation cards, the step-and-repeat backdrop, and the flanking stage banners. I also designed and built the event landing page on the Shockoe Institute website, which served as the central hub for the agenda, speaker information, and ticketing.
Imagining Solidarity at the ICA
Event · November 2025
For the Shockoe Institute Presents event held at the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU, I developed a full campaign spanning social media, email, and on-screen event graphics. The event featured three artists, and I created individual spotlight graphics for each using a vinyl CD cover concept — a creative direction I developed to give each artist their own moment while keeping the campaign visually unified. The format was unexpected for a nonprofit context and gave the series a cultural energy that matched the event's subject matter.
