The organization needed a steady presence across five Alberta markets rather than a series of disconnected regional pushes. It had to serve brand awareness, long-term recruitment and event visibility at the same time. It also had to be fundable, since an executive board would decide the budget. That meant presenting real options with the consequences of each one attached.

Four audiences sitting at different stages of the same decision, plus three priority trades. Paid social belonged at the top of the funnel, warming people up for recruitment and event messaging rather than asking for a conversion straight away.

The audience work is what set the direction. Rather than starting from a media plan, I asked where these people already were: Indigenous friendship centres, career fairs and employment hubs, sporting event crowds, competitors’ training centres, flooring companies and supply stores, and construction-adjacent workplaces.

It ended up being one plan written twice. The delivery teams needed something they could work from day to day, and the board needed something it could decide on in a meeting, so I wrote an internal operational plan and a separate budget summary and kept the detail in the right one.

Rather than a single number, I structured the budget as three tiers. Each tier carried its own daily spend, campaign frequency, audience coverage and modelled reach, so the board was choosing a level of ambition rather than approving a line item.

Four quarters, each with a theme and the real events behind it, so spend lined up with the times of year people were already gathered in one place.

I set the measurement framework across reach, engagement, video performance, frequency and audience coverage, with site traffic and dynamic QR codes giving a more direct read on response.

Governance was written into the plan. All creative and messaging approved centrally. Non-partisan messaging only, with no employer-specific or political endorsements. Reporting monthly or quarterly, with recaps after each event.

The plan also said, in writing, what would make it fail. Coordinating remotely could not capture timely content or keep pace with live events, so I made a named Alberta-based point of contact a condition of delivery. The responsibilities, the risk of going without one, and a blank for the name all went into the document before sign-off.

“This role is essential, not optional.”

A steady stream of campaigns rather than one big push, and no two briefs were alike: different regions, languages, audiences, objectives and budgets, all on the same platform. Recruitment campaigns had to reach skilled workers across provinces. Organizing campaigns needed tightly drawn audiences and were judged on outcomes rather than clicks. Budgets were modest throughout, so each campaign had to be planned on its own terms while the portfolio as a whole still held up.

Targeting was written per campaign and never recycled. Spanish-speaking tradesmen in their twenties and thirties for one. Carpenters aged 20 to 50 in a prairie city for another. Indigenous workers, flooring suppliers and construction suppliers for a training push. A parenthood audience served in both Spanish and English. What carried across the portfolio was the process, not the settings.

The two kinds of campaign could not be judged the same way either. Recruitment work was measured on cost per result and click quality; organizing work on reach and frequency inside a specific workforce, because a click was never the real outcome there. Keeping those scorecards separate is what let me compare like with like.

Every campaign ran through the same six steps. The structure stayed constant. Targeting, language and creative were built for the region and the workforce.

The range is wide. The largest campaign ran in four languages across fifteen locations on a modest budget and returned one of the lowest costs per result of any I ran. Others were far smaller: one city, one audience, sometimes a single organizing drive.

I logged every one of them the same way: objective, locations, languages, budget, targeting, impressions, reach, clicks and cost per result. Keeping campaign-level records consistently is what made patterns visible across the portfolio, including the finding below.

Both campaigns had the same underlying problem: a policy issue that matters enormously to the people it affects and almost nothing to anybody else until it is explained. Each had to support live advocacy while educating members, policymakers and the wider industry, in windows when policy attention was already high. What differed was the budget and the channel available.

Paid media buys certainty about who sees a message and when. Organic content buys credibility, because it arrives through someone the audience already trusts. Neither one substitutes for the other, and an advocacy campaign is usually stronger when the plan says which job each is doing.

On GC Liability the audience was geographic and the window was short, so paid was the only way to guarantee the message was in front of the right people on the right days. On Tax Fraud there was no paid distribution, which moves the work into sequencing and message design.

Paid Meta advertising targeted to Ontario audiences, with a focus around Queen’s Park, supporting lobbyists throughout active advocacy efforts. The campaigns helped build visibility and reinforce key messages while the advocacy work was under way. I planned the targeting, budget, scheduling and creative direction, and monitored performance while it ran.

One issue explained for two audiences who rarely read the same thing: government stakeholders weighing policy, and a public with no particular reason to know it exists. Educational posts, awareness graphics and advocacy messaging several times a week, timed to periods of elevated policy attention and built so members would share them into networks the organization could not buy its way into.

Campaign lead on both. Strategy, communications planning, Meta advertising strategy, scheduling, audience targeting, budget recommendations, messaging direction, coordination, performance monitoring and reporting.

ORGANIC POST

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Institutional accounts in the skilled trades tend to underperform, and it is rarely a production problem. The organization needed a content direction that could compete with individual creators for the attention of people considering the trades. That meant understanding the niche as it behaves, not as an employer brand would like it to.

I identified fifteen high-performing pieces of content across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok in the construction and skilled trades niche, then documented each one the same way. Platform, format, the hook in the first three seconds, approximate views, and a written explanation of why it worked.

Coding a set of examples against a consistent frame and reading the patterns back out is qualitative method applied to a marketing problem. It is the part of my research training that transfers most directly.

Five patterns explained most of the variation. Two of them are uncomfortable for an institutional account, which is exactly why they were worth writing down.

The plan gave each platform a job instead of posting everywhere identically. Facebook for community and events, Instagram for recruitment discovery, LinkedIn for industry credibility and employer engagement, X for real-time coverage. Six content pillars, a cadence per platform, and a quarterly arc from awareness through recruitment momentum to event coverage and year-end credibility.

The research became a written content strategy and a platform-by-platform plan the team could publish against.

Research and strategy document

Content it produced

A growing team supported the national council, regional councils, dozens of local unions, training centres, procurement, organizing, government relations and a long list of government-funded programs. Each one behaved like a separate client. Requests arrived informally, approvals varied by project, files were hard to find, and nobody could see workloads clearly enough to plan. Leadership had no reliable read on capacity.

The department was already running like an in-house agency, so it needed the same basics an agency has: a set path through approval, and a record of where the time and the money went.

None of that needed new software. It needed approvals, tracking and documentation people would actually use, so the team could see its own workload and leadership could see what capacity was left.

I worked closely with my director to design and establish the department's operating structure. My role was translating that direction into practical systems, documentation and workflows, then implementing them with the team and maintaining them day-to-day.

The tracker was not administration for its own sake. Because hours were logged against clients and split between project work and admin, the department could finally answer questions it could not before. Which internal clients consumed the most capacity. How much of the team’s time was billable. Where a project stood. Whether spend was tracking against the approved budget.

I also ran the department’s financial administration: annual budget preparation, invoice and vendor tracking, cost allocation across internal clients, and reconciliation against approved budgets.

Systems only work if people are supported inside them, so I built a rhythm the team could rely on. The job was not only creating processes, but making them usable enough that a growing team could work consistently inside them.

A national flagship account, national and provincial bodies, and a set of local unions across several provinces. Each had its own audience, region and content needs. Every account had to sound like itself while holding to organizational messaging and non-partisan rules. Several were onboarded from nothing during this period, including one that launched with no followers.

Consistency does not come from nine accounts posting the same thing. It comes from a review that happens before anything goes out, and from giving each platform a job of its own.

The deliberate bet was LinkedIn. An industry and contractor audience was reachable there and almost nobody in the sector was competing for it.

The flagship account carried recruitment, member stories and advocacy across five platforms. Instagram and Facebook ran recruitment discovery and community content, TikTok was activated from nothing, and X was held steady as a real-time channel rather than chased for growth. One review process held all of it to the same standard.