Jason Cooper

Digital and Creative Leadership

Mission-driven professional with significant expertise shipping digital products and campaigns for nonprofit organizations.

Adept translator of technology details into plain-speak, user stories into business requirements, and customer desires into product features. Strong social intelligence, empathy, good-humor, and conflict-resolution skills that help build effective teams.

Jason Cooper

Contact

A photo of the cracked, brown, and tan ground at Joshua Tree National Park, with mountains in the far background, all under a blue sky. Fluffy white clouds peek at the edges.

A photo I took of Joshua Tree National Park's otherwordly and beautiful terrain.

Work Experience

Consulting
Product & IT Strategy and Implementation

  •  Giving Gap
  •  Remote from Los Angeles, CA
  •  2021 – May 2023
  • Managed the relaunch of the giveblck.org web app and brand as givinggap.org, the nation's largest directory of Black-founded nonprofit organizations.
  • Led the development of a headless CMS for givinggap.org, built on Sanity.io and Netlify, deepening the engagement of users on the site.
  • Managed all IT operations for Giving Gap's product and team collaboration, including: Google Workspace, Cloudflare, GitHub, Adobe, Zoom, Slack, Trello, hardware procurement, and support desk functions.
  • Implemented SEO best practices, resulting in a 64% improvement in search engine rankings and a significant increase in organic traffic.
  • Crafted and managed the IT budget, optimizing costs and ensuring efficient allocation of resources to meet organizational goals.
  • Product manager for the site: gathering requirements from senior stakeholders, coordinating cross-functional teams of engineers and designers, and regularly deployed iterations on time and within budget.
  • Monitored and analyzed web metrics and KPIs, generating actionable insights that informed digital strategy decision-making and product development.
  • Managed the database of Black-founded organizations using the Google Sheets API, improving data accuracy and access for internal stakeholders.


Web Design and SEO Consultation

  •  NRF Foundation
  •  Remote from Los Angeles, CA
  •  2023 – Current
  • Designed and implemented new web pages using custom HTML and CSS within a Drupal CMS for nrffoundation.org, aligning with branding guidelines and improving site aesthetics.
  • Conducted comprehensive SEO audits and implemented best practices, resulting in increases in organic search traffic.
  • Collaborated with cross-functional teams to ensure seamless integration of content and design elements, enhancing overall website functionality.
  • Led the redesign of key sections of the website, incorporating user feedback (internal and external to the organization) to enhance visual appeal and usability.
  • Assisted in the implementation of best practices for metadata, enhancing social media sharing of web pages and increasing referral traffic from social platforms.
  • Played a key role in migrating the website from a Drupal CMS to a headless CMS, improving content management flexibility and website performance.

Director, Digital & Creative Services
Operationalizing Digital Engagement and Creative Strategy

  •  KABOOM!
  •  Remote from Los Angeles, CA
  •  2017-September 2021
  • During tenure, implemented comprehensive SEO, UX, and content marketing strategies, alongside social media and email campaigns that increased overall kaboom.org users +11%, organic users +96%, social users 70%, and email users 28%. Increased unrestricted revenue raised online by 439%.
  • Served as a Senior Team member, helping to build organizational growth strategies and operational functions.
  • Leader of the digital and graphic rebranding of KABOOM!, which expresses and promotes a brand evolution and focus on racial equity.
  • Unified operations for the digital and creative teams into cooperative unit, which fused disparate print and digital expressions into a singular, cohesive brand expression.
  • Managed and mentored successful digital and creative teams, directly overseeing 3-7 employees.
  • Managed day-to-day collateral and video production.
  • Supervising producer for the documentary film "From Piece to Peace: The Pullman Playground Story".
  • Product manager for Our Dream Playground, Map of Play, and KMS, shipping bi-weekly iterations of each product, including performing end-of-life operations for all three in 2019, 2020, and 2021 respectively.

Associate Director, Digital & Creative Services
Website Development, Engagement, and Program Work

  •  KABOOM!
  •  Remote from Los Angeles, CA
  •  2015-2017
  • Rebuilt kaboom.org with a focus on page speed, SEO, and complimenting SEM strategy. Improved monthly avg. time on site by 50%, visits by 18%, and decreased bounce rate by 4%.
  • Designed and produced digital publications such as: KABOOM! Play Everywhere Playbook, Playground Reopening Guidance, and A Race Equity Journey.
  • Served as a leader in the conception of Play Everywhere, a playspace and urban design initiative that aims to transform everyday spaces into micro-installations for kids to play.
  • Led the development of tools to score the America's Most Playful Family Contest, a nationwide sweepstakes campaign to discover playful families and award them a Disney Parks vacation.
  • Programmed staff retreats: event design, video production, program development, A/V production and served as master of ceremonies.

Senior Manager, Product & Content
Product Development and Team Management

  •  KABOOM!
  •  Washington D.C.
  •  2012-2015
  • Launched Kontent Management System (KMS), a Ruby on Rails content management system, to power KABOOM! website (kaboom.org).
  • Launched webapp: Map of Play, a crowd- sourced, national directory of playgrounds. Over 100,000 playspaces added from tens of thousands of users (mapofplay.kaboom.org).
  • Launched webapp: Our Dream Playground, a DIY playground project management and fundraising tool for users to develop community-built playground projects (ourdreamplayground.kaboom.org).
  • Initiated and established Agile product development methods resulting in improved app security, user satisfaction, and pace of functionality enhancement.
  • Reorganized external digital team into an in- house Software Engineering Unit significantly cutting costs and improving outcomes of digital campaigns and product upgrades.
  • Documented feature requests, bugs, business requirements and more. Communicated and translated product timelines, scope of work, and user stories between developers and organization leadership.

Coordinator, Quality Assurance
Data-Driven Product Leadership

  •  KABOOM!
  •  Washington D.C.
  •  2011-2012
  • Directed the organization to use data-driven decision making for all digital products and campaigns. Resulting in the creation of an updated content strategy for the kaboom.org blog. The data analysis also resulted in decisions to rebuild the Playspace Finder and DIY Playground Builder towards user-centric designs.
  • Ensured every release was bug-free, developed documentation for products, and introduced Agile practices to product development.

Coordinator, Online Community
Community Engagement and Marketing

  •  KABOOM!
  •  Washington D.C.
  •  2007-2011
  • Community manager and moderator for KABOOM! owned community channels. Fostering relationships between playground builders, concerned parents, and play-focused educators/city planners.
  • Created and maintained the organization's presence and positive reputation across burgeoning social media channels.
  • Developed early social media follower base. Started from zero and organically grew total base to low 10,000's of followers.
    • Implemented Google Grant, developing and monitoring SEM strategy through Google Ads.
  • Transitioned organization KPIs from hit-based metric analysis to Google Analytics. Provided monthly analysis and reporting on website, email, and social media performance.

Education

Professional Development

Phase One Equity Training · Racial Equity Institute, Dec 2018

UX Design Edge Training · Everett McKay, Nov 2011

Google Seminars for Success · Alex Broussard, EpikOne, Jun 2009

School

Oakland University · Rochester, MI · B.A., Political Science

Internship · U.S. Senator Carl Levin · Warren, MI office

Skills

Expertise

  • Agile, Kanban, Scrum Product Management
  • Adobe Dreamweaver
  • HTML/CSS
  • Google Ads
  • Google Analytics
  • Google Search Console
  • Microsoft Office 365
  • Microsoft Teams
  • Slack
  • WordPress
  • WordPress Plugins: Advanced Custom Fields, Contact Form 7, Yoast
  • WP Engine

Soft Skills

  • Conflict-resolution Skills
  • Good Humor
  • Social Intellience
  • Managing Cross-discipline Teams
  • Empathy in 360°
  • Mentoring or Training Early Career Collegues

Significant Experience

  • Adobe InDesign
  • Adobe Photoshop
  • Box Cloud Services
  • Github
  • Mailchimp
  • Microsoft Planner
  • MySQL
  • PHP
  • Salesforce
  • Salesforce Marketing Cloud

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