Nathaniel Bergson-Michelson Email & Phone Number

San Francisco Bay Area

Responsible for building the strength and visibility of the brand of one of the country's most famed and innovative Jewish institutions by directing its marketing, communications, and web strategies and advancing its data analytics and business intelligence. In addition, I oversee the operations for fitness, sports and aquatics, and membership. Every year, the Oshman Family JCC brings a million visitors a year to its cultural arts programs and community events, preschool and afterschool programs, classes and social events, summer camps, fitness and wellness center, and conferences and donor events. In an organization offering such diverse services across multiple industries, data systems and demographic cohorts, I ensure that the brand is coherent and the marketing strategies are cost-effective and synergistic. As the Oshman Family JCC's chief communications strategist, I drive the evolution of its brand presence, messaging, corporate communications and PR strategy, and handle all crisis communications. I serve as the OFJCC's web services director, managing an internal web team and web development resources, and have taken several new websites from concept to launch. Business intelligence is central not only to marketing strategies, but to key performance indicators that I have developed to keep the CEO, executive team and Board informed on operations, audience growth, CLV and opportunities. I work closely with the Development team on donor communications, cultivation, and acknowledgement; on promoting major donor events; and on strategy for communicating impact and advancing the endowment. My guiding principle is to build a lifelong, passionate relationship between the organization and its members and stakeholders by ensuring that the OFJCC truly understands its community's needs, and delivers exactly the right information at the right time to inform and uplift its audience.

San Francisco Bay Area

In the business intelligence role, I worked to empower one of Northern California's busiest and most complex cultural, wellness and learning centers to make better business and mission-based decisions through data-driven insights. I directed the JCCSF's market research, program assessment, user feedback, business analytics, and data discovery. I oversaw the agency's strategy for gathering, reporting, and analyzing data to guide user experience, program quality and service mix, delivery upon mission-driven outcomes, use of resources, and recognition of emerging opportunities. Working with department heads across the organization, I identified the analytics, data visualizations, reports, dashboards and forecasts that best supported their operational planning, and provided leadership and guidance for the JCCSF’s implementation of self-service business intelligence and data discovery. I also directed the work of outside market research consultants, survey platform vendors, market research tool providers, business analysts, and BI platform providers.

San Francisco Bay Area

As Director of Strategic Marketing and Communications, I drove the community's awareness of one of Northern California’s most vibrant cultural centers and the thousands of different programs beneath its roof and on its digital venues. The JCCSF welcomed more than 1.5 million visitors a year and operated a fitness and aquatics center, three preschools, recreational classes, senior services, summer camps, and one of the Bay Area’s foremost concert and lecture series. Hired as Marketing Services Manager in 2006 to produce unique, cost-effective campaigns to attract participants to this extraordinary range of programs, I was advanced to Director of Marketing in 2008 amidst an executive transition, recession-induced fiscal strains, and preparations for the largest event in our history, the JCC Maccabi Games. I was immediately tasked with guiding the agency’s communications and serving as its media spokesperson, as well as slashing our marketing budgets while still driving recovery in our flagging membership. I simultaneously needed to build a parallel marketing effort to support the volunteer-led effort of the Games. Protests, bomb threats, and the death of a member on site all provided additional challenges. By 2011, we were firmly on the path to recovery, achieving new records for fitness membership, youth swimming and sports, camps, afterschool programs, lecture and performance tickets, senior lunches, website visitors, and social media followers. I reorganized our marketing structure, introduced new planning and project management tools, instituted social and search marketing as the core of integrated multichannel campaigns, created new stakeholder communications, and established a market research program. I directed brand strategy, market research, PR, and communications; oversaw all institutional, program and membership marketing; and managed a staff of twelve covering the broad range of marketing disciplines.

As EMCM, I promoted sales of $325 million/year in textbooks & learning technology across 26 academic disciplines through integrated campaigns featuring customized websites, direct mail/email, brochures, catalogs, flash demos, electronic surveys, in-book ads, posters, event invitations, and advertising. I moved MarComm from traditional strategies toward faster, smarter, personalized, more cost-effective campaigns that better helped us to reach students and bookstore managers. Important innovations included refocusing staff on customizable online tools, shifting production of standard sales tools earlier to create a window for targeted marketing campaigns, providing better analysis of response rates, expanding the pool of trained writers, and collaborating across the organization to refine communications about the complex product menu of texts and technology.

I was hired as Director of Editorial Operations to impose order on an out-of-control production system. This telecommunications analyst firm had quadrupled its personnel and output in less than two years, without changing editorial procedures. The result was a months-long backlog on delivering highly time-sensitive market research to major telecom firms. RHK hired me to create an editing, design, and production process to withstand sustained growth and rapid change. I cleared a year-old logjam in printing and renegotiated printing contracts, cut editing time by 80-90%, slashed design costs, recruited talented editorial and design managers, established a style guide, designed a document management system, and worked with marketing to bring PR into line with product messaging so that customers received a coherent statement of the value of the firm's research.

In the midst of the first dot-com boom, I oversaw editorial content and information architecture for one of the top 250 sites on the Web and its more than 120,000 pieces of user-generated art. As SayIt.com's Editorial Director, I managed editorial content and voice, site navigation, communication for affiliate marketing, recruitment of web writers, content development, research into relevant laws and consumer groups, domain name registration, and portions of the investor briefing books. Wearing a second hat as Content Manager, I hired and trained catalogers and quality controllers, documented copyright/privacy policies, and reorganized the browsing hierarchy. I also served as Copyright Agent.

Tokyo, Japan

Working with clients in Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of International Trade and Industry, Imperial Household Agency, and numerous leading Japanese firms, I was responsible for a broad range of Urban Connections' PR, polling, document services, conference planning, and policy analysis services as well as its North American business development. As Editor, I transformed a simple copy editing job into a consulting role, developing new products and launching our unique brand identity as an added-value information services vendor. Made Editorial Department Chief, I grew our accounts to a dozen ministries, accompanied the Japanese Prime Minister to 20 countries, and helped my firm grow from three to sixty employees. I developed PR campaigns, magazines, media consulting services, annual reports, and books by two prime ministers. Moving into the role of Director of North American Operations, I expanded our core business into trade development, market access, and software localization. I analyzed market access data for the Commerce Department, ran cost-benefit assessment on ad placements, and built partnerships with MassPort & industrial instrumentation firms. As Partner/Senior Consultant, I aided top diplomats, ran conferences, and wrote speeches.