Blend of warm colors paint the sky as night fall in Joshua Tree National Park.

Founder

About the Founder

A visual storyteller and strategic visionary

Jeff Lawrence is an executive with more than 24 years of senior management leadership experience at Fortune 500 and international financial institutions in the public and private sectors. Jeff is a visual storyteller and strategic visionary who successfully grows resources into highly productive and motivated teams by fostering an environment that nurtures passion, innovation, curiosity, honesty, high ethics, good judgment, communication, and selflessness.

He has a proven track record of transforming creative resources into highly productive multifunctional teams, yielding increasing profitability and nearly doubling revenues.

Creative Leadership

He is a creative leader with experience transforming an in-house creative agency into a highly productive multifunctional team. As the manager of The World Bank’s in-house creative agency, he led a multifunctional team with a mission-driven strategy that advanced the World Bank’s knowledge and learning objectives. Key responsibilities included: marketing campaigns, managing brands, and producing visual communication collateral, including visual design, electronic publishing, video production, publications, photography, event management, social media and exhibition services, marketing, sales, and disseminating (distributing) research results and data via multiple communication channels for multicultural, international audiences. This strategy ensures that knowledge-sharing is cost-effective, efficient, and environmentally responsible. The team’s tagline was “We are the visual storytellers.”

Key Account Management

Jeff believes transparent client communication and building solid collaborative relationships are the keys to successfully delivering on the client’s project vision. As the client liaison, he provides strategic guidance for his clients. Jeff becomes the trusted conduit of understanding between the client, designers, and developers, clearly understanding the client’s objectives and the recommended technical solutions. He successfully delivers collaborative, results-oriented strategies to deliver on the client’s project vision on time and within budget.

He led multiple Agile/Scrum project teams with a scope of responsibility for more than 200 resources across six major corporate media clients. He led the project vision, design, and implementation of more than 100 websites for major media companies. His team received numerous awards, including:

  • 2013 17th Annual Webby Award Nominee-The Genographic Project
  • 2013 SXSW Interactive Awards Finalist
  • Best in Class Interactive Media Award for Science & Technology
  • The 14th annual Horizon Interactive Awards competition was won by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC).

Enterprise-wide Digital Media Solutions

As a digital asset management (DAM) subject matter expert, Jeff regularly contributed to the CMS newswire, DAM News. He served as a voting member on the DAM Foundation Board, a not-for-profit global community that establishes best practices in digital asset management. He worked on establishing best practices within the DAM community and promoting education.

He has over 24 years of experience providing strategy, assessment, platform selection, and enterprise-wide implementation of digital media solutions – specifically enterprise search, content management, and digital and media asset management – for nonprofit, education, entertainment, and media clients such as The World Bank, National Geographic Society, National Geographic Channel, PBS, AAMC, The Virginia Lottery, and George Washington University.

  • Jeff led the National Geographic Society’s initiative to unify information sources across multiple asset management systems
  • Jeff led a workflow efficiency project to ingest National Geographic Magazine photographer-generated videos into the Avid InterPlay MAM system.
  • Jeff developed the content migration strategy for The George Washington University Brand Unified Web Presence (UWP) Project. As the content project manager and facilitator, Jeff was responsible for managing information across client stakeholders and was instrumental in driving the end-to-end successful migration, development, and enhancement of more than 5000 content pages
  • Jeff led an assessment project for a new Digital Asset Management (DAM) system to integrate with MyPBS, PressRoom, Broadview, IPMAM and other existing systems.

As a voting member of the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), Jeff contributed to simplifying the distribution of information and metadata standards. IPTC is focused on developing and promoting industry standards for the exchange of news data for all common media types and was instrumental in developing NewsML-G2, NinJS, RightsML, and the IPTC Photo Metadata Standards. This organization maintains the IPTC NewsCodes controlled vocabularies, including the global standard media topics subject vocabulary, covering six languages.

Technology Leadership

As a technology director for more than 11 years, he focused on leveraging innovation to increase profitability and control costs. His multi-year technology roadmap, capitalizing on emerging technologies and efficiencies, yielded innovation breakthroughs year-after-year that increased productivity by more than 300%, reduced staffing costs, and delivered exponential revenue growth.

What people say

Jill Lawson, Business Transformation Leader

“I’ve had the pleasure of working for Jeff when he was a client at McClatchy, networking with him while he was at Sapient/GW, and hiring him to lead my first highly visible project with National Geographic Society. Jeff’s persistence and charm allow him to earn trust, build relationships and solve the unsolvable. He collaborates and makes quick decisions. Jeff was directly responsible for our double-digit growth year-over-year.

People describe him as a godsend during a critical time and it is so true. His ability to successfully take control of key client relationships and effectively manage related work, not only leads to satisfied stakeholders but lasting impacts. Proactive, experienced, and results-driven, I’d recommend working with Jeff if you ever have the opportunity.”

Stavros Hilaris, A Chief Technology Officer

“Jeff is a consummate professional. I brought him to National Geographic to run a project (requirements gathering, architecting solution, through an RFP process, bake-off between two vendors, and vendor selection).

He is knowledgeable, thorough, and persistent. The greater the challenge, the more he rises to overcome it. I’ve truly enjoyed having Jeff on my team.”

Tina Williams, User Experience Leader

“Vibrant, extremely personable, and highly reliable, Jeff was a godsend during a critical time. His ability to successfully take control of key client relationships and effectively manage related work, not only lead to satisfied stakeholders but also improved and even extended existing relationships for our team. Proactive, experienced, and results-driven, I’d recommend Jeff on just about any web initiative.”

Core Subject Matter Expertise Areas

Communications and Marketing Strategy

Publishing

Digital Media Strategies

Creative Talent Development

Content Management Systems

Website design

Workflow efficiencies

Personal Tidbits

  • As a professional photographer, Jeff covered five Olympics and four Discovery Channel Eco-Challenges, the world’s toughest expedition race.
  • He was an avid sailor and racer who, as a teenager, tried out for the Olympics in the Star boat class
  • He enjoys adventure travel and meeting new people
  • In 2022, he took a month-long road trip to go hiking in ten national parks across the United States.