About Brian
Brian Pagels is a senior strategist and communications professional who has spent the past 15 years helping influential organizations increase their impact. Since founding his independent consultancy and partnering with Structure3C in late 2016, his work has included developing a new content strategy and process for supporting missions around the world for USAID’s Office of Education, launching a new online community and collaboration platform for the CDC’s 6:18 Initiative, and helping teams at IBM, Salesforce, and Autodesk develop and implement strategies to better reach and engage with their customer communities.
Earlier in his career he designed multi-channel campaigns to disseminate research for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that led to hundreds of press clips, helped the Brady Campaign significantly increase end-of-year fundraising in only six weeks, and co-produced a music festival that was featured on NPR and in the Washington Post.
A key focus of his career has been online community and collaboration strategy, design, and management. He’s crafted online community strategies for organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Independent Sector, and trained AARP and World Bank staff on best practices in community management. For more than two years he served as community manager for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Alumni Network, and from 2013-2016 he advised United Way Worldwide on the development and maintenance of their Drupal-based global social intranet platform. He’s also helped organize and run a series of research projects and events for online community leaders and practitioners, including recent work with the Cohere Mastermind and the DC Community Managers Meetup.
Immediately prior to starting his own business in 2016, Brian served as Chief Impact Officer & Director of Data Services at Forum One, a digital agency that works for mission-focused organizations. In this role Brian helped nonprofits, foundations, and government agencies measure the impact of their digital efforts and explore opportunities to manage, visualize, and share data more effectively. In 2016, he conducted an original research study on nonprofit communications effectiveness and wrote the corresponding white paper Do Your Communications Efforts Measure Up?: Measuring the Impact of Nonprofit Communications.
He also co-authored the white paper Communicating Data for Impact published by Forum One and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, and the tutorial Worth a Thousand Words: How to Display Health Data published by the California HealthCare Foundation. He's a sought-after speaker and has presented on a range of communications and data-related topics at events including the Communications Network webinar series, Do Good Data Conference, Health Datapalooza, the Nonprofit Technology Conference, the Healthy Communities Data Summit, Aligning Forces 4 Quality Annual Meeting, TechChange, Transparency Camp and more.
Brian holds a BA in Journalism and Political science from the University of Richmond, where he served as editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, and an MA in Communication, Culture, and Technology from Georgetown University. He wrote his thesis on the political media habits of youth voters, focusing on the 2004 presidential election, and conducted postgraduate research for the Pew Charitable Trusts’ New Voters Project. Outside of his day job, he plays guitar and sings in the Washington, DC-based band The Beanstalk Library.
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