Hi, I'm Lauren.
I make complicated things make sense.
Former tech journalist turned strategist, still asking the
tough questions.
About me
More than 10 years, two continents, one consistent job: taking the complicated thing and getting the right to people care about it.I started as a tech journalist in South Africa. I covered (then) emerging technologies like AI and 5G, the different ways big businesses were desperately trying to embrace digital transformation, and how small startups were disrupting their industries overnight.I'm now a strategy director at a comms and content agency in New York, building communications and digital strategy for Fortune 500 tech brands – where the products are hard to explain and the audience is too smart to be sold to.I left journalism. It hasn't entirely left me. I'm still convinced there's a human story buried in every technical brief. Still verifying every insight. Still asking the tough questions.
Brands I've worked with:
Areas of expertise:
Writing
Tech Knowledge
Channel Strategy
Messaging & Positioning
Creative Briefs
Content Achitecture
Measurement
Presenting
Audience Research
Exec Comms
Public Relations
Community Building
Team Leadership
New Business
A sample of strategy case studies:
Building Niche Communities - Channel Strategy
QualcommI oversaw a team of strategists and analysts to develop a comprehensive, phased plan for Qualcomm to reach its developer audeince where they are at. The included a strategy for organic growth, content creation, community moderation, and engagement with subject matter experts. It also included a blueprint for hosting virtual events, positioning the Discord channel as the central hub for our developer-facing communications.Grew Discord to 6,000 members, scaled a 80K+ email list by 20%, and launched a LinkedIn showcase page to 1,000 followers in its first month.
Digital War Room - Earned & Social Integrated Comms
Bark- a content monitoring company for children's devicesWe were spending hours creating content for an exec we supported and getting mediocre results. We decide to put her in the middle of the action, live-tweeting her POV of the US Senate hearings on social media’s impact on children's mental health. I led this high-stakes project, developed to react quickly to a fast-moving news cycle.Inbound requests from USAToday and Reuters journalists who saw the tweets, and average organic engagement grew by more than 300%.
Content Strategy - Tech History
IBMTo make sense of and organize a massive historical archive to preserve IBM's legacy and its role in the history of American technology.We organized historical information to structure it in a way that was both historically accurate and easy for the public to navigate. I wrote the content outlines for every single page, ensuring a consistent tone and clear narrative across the entire site. I then worked directly with IBM stakeholders and UX designers to categorize all the information on the site.The site consisted of 133 individual story pages.
Global Brand Campaign - E-Commerce
AlibabaOur brief was to drive applications, from each participating country, for Alibaba's pan-African "Netpreneur Competition", and viewership of the finale. This required creating region-specific content to account for a range of media consumption habits, languages and cultures. The team included members situated in Shanghai, San Francisco, Nairobi, and Johannesburg.Received roughly 10,000 applications from 50 African countries .
A selection of published articles from my journalism days:
Drop me a line: