My Story.

After graduating from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications I began working in NW Ayer’s media buying department. A few years later I started my own communications company and built a client base including: McKinsey and Company, Pfizer, Wyeth, Ricoh, Konica, and Emerson Electric. It was during this time that I wrote and produced the PBS documentary ‘Sending Out the Light, The History of America’s Lighthouses’.

After ten years of working with corporate clients in the New York area, I had the opportunity to move to Hawaii to build the regional marketing communications department for the U.S. Navy in Pearl Harbor. This was a wonderful opportunity to build a comprehensive marketing communications team to support 25 departments - including athletics, family services, and special events with marketing and communications. I built the department with 15 talented people and the equipment needed to provide full-service public relations, creative production and distribution. Our team was responsible for media relations, monthly articles, website management, social media channels, and newsletters. Our designers were organized to support the publicity specialists in their graphic, photographic, video, printing and website needs. This was a new organizational model for the Navy, and has now been adopted across most installations throughout the Navy. It also earned me the National Armed Forces ‘Behind the Scenes’ award.

In 2007 I was requested to take a temporary duty to lead a team from all Navy installations in the development of a new to Navy - content managed website system for public relations. We stood-up 17 sites over the two-year project, and the sites are still active in their original architecture today at www.cnic.nacy.mil. I received a citation from the Commander of Navy Installations and was asked to lead a new effort to develop a content managed system for the activity and recreation departments in a similar manner. This brought a new challenge in that each site needed to be unique in design, yet managed from the same content management system. We successfully launched these sites across all Navy installations in 2013.

In 2011 I received my MBA from HPU and then began to get involved at alumni admission events. This new passion soon brought me to begin teaching which was formative in shifting my career to higher education. In 2015 I joined the university as the Director of Marketing and began working to increase enrollment and bring marketing and communications together as one department.

I have dedicated my career to learning and developing my skills in communications, marketing strategy, and brand development. I have had the unique opportunity to express my abilities across multiple markets, including corporate sales, large government, and higher education. This gives me perspective on why people are driven to connect and how to best engage them. Critical to moving prospects to become interested, and interested prospects to become engaged believers, is in the connection between brand development, marketing strategy, and communications.

 Jeff Harris