Tommi Pryor

Tommi Pryor is a veteran direct marketer, email marketer and marketing strategist who has served distinguished clients including several candidates for President of the United States, 65 U.S. Congressional offices. U.S. Navy Reserves and leading national commercial and nonprofit clients.  A proven and respected thought-leader and progressive marketing expert, her strategies and campaigns have had a transformative effect in business, politics and the nonprofit sectors.  Her numerous "best practices" columns and articles on direct marketing, email marketing, data acquisition and marketing and other topics have appeared in a variety of national publications. She has also been interviewed and appeared in articles including TIME, Los Angeles Times, Kansas City Star, Houston Chronicle, Chronicle of Philanthropy and New York's WOR radio to name a few.  As a forward-thinking innovator with a passionate entrepreneurial spirit, Tommi has been responsible for many industry FIRSTS across sectors starting when she was fresh out of college as a pioneer in educational marketing.  In an effort to address dwindling college enrollments affecting U.S. post-secondary schools, she co-founded the nation's FIRST organization compiling and offering college-bound high school mailing lists and direct marketing training launching the new field of recruitment-marketing that revolutionized the college admissions field.  This is the state-of-the art today. Another FIRST while serving as a consultant to telecommunications giant SPRINT, she designed and delivered an affinity marketing program with a K-12 private school network using long distance services as a fundraising tool setting a precedent for the many others that followed.  In addition, she developed the FIRST-ever national affinity marketing campaign targeted to college students by a major bankcard issuer. Other FIRSTS included creation, development and launch of the FIRST children's search engine, Kids Search, and being the FIRST-to-market with nationwide voter emails serving the political market. She was the mastermind and creative force behind an historic campaign for a winning U.S. presidential ticket that brought millions of voters aligned with the views and values of the candidates into the political mainstream. This was the FIRST time a U.S. presidential campaign undertook an official outreach to the target group which garnered major publicity in the national media. The groundbreaking campaign helped mobilize and establish a powerful voting block influencing election outcomes and public policy for the three decades that have followed transforming the national political landscape. It also achieved the lowest cost-per-vote for the Campaign.   In addition to that hallmark campaign under the umbrella of the marketing agency she then owner-managed in the nation's capital, Tommi built and served a distinguished client list including major financial institutions and credit card companies, healthcare and insurance companies, colleges and universities, leading nonprofits, government accounts including U.S. Congressional offices, national political parties and related committees, and other U.S. presidential campaigns and draft committees.  Later recruited to serve as National Director of State Initiatives for the oldest and largest academic mentoring company, and subsequently appointed Special Advisor to the Chairman of the Board, she assisted with its transition to an e-learning company and in building a nationwide government relations infrastructure, Tommi successfully cultivated relationships with legislators from 28 target states.  She also won the support of California's governor, first lady, commissioner of education and leaders of both the state senate and state assembly for a company sponsored initiative.  This influence coupled with the strategic marketing program she developed contributed to passage of a $200 million appropriation toward K-12 reading and math programs.  This provided funds to the schools that they could opt to use to obtain the company's products and services. The passage of an appropriations bill, subsequently signed into law by the governor, was considered a remarkable achievement in light of California's budget crisis at the time.  Significant appropriation bills were also passed and signed into law under her term of leadership in Ohio and Texas. Tommi went on to serve in senior management at Vertis Communications, one of the largest multi-channel marketing companies in the world, and as Vice President Development & Marketing of the direct marketing division of public company SourceCorp, Inc.  In both corporate roles, she was recruited to develop and launch a  nonprofit sales vertical.  At Vertis, early national account wins included Easter Seals, Compassion International, Feed the Children, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Easter Seals, Muscular Dystrophy Association, American Cancer Society, Special Olympics and United Negro College Fund among many others. At SourceCorp, the new vertical she launched and managed, enhanced the acquisition value of the direct marketing division which was successfully sold per plan following the 12th month of implementation. This included writing and implementing a national marketing plan for the segment, developing a lead program for the sales force generating 500+ high-value segment leads and ultimately achieving business unit growth at 250% above industry average. For the last decade, Tommi has owner-managed a digital marketing and data agency serving the political, nonprofit and commercial markets with email marketing data and turn-key services as well as  online media placement.  In late 2014, along with continued management of her agency, she co-founded and has served as a managing partner of an email service provider (ESP) and data compiler/manager winning the business of a respected daily newspaper in the nation's capital. This included distributing advertiser emails and its daily news alerts along with helping to optimize email performance and build subscriptions for its national digital edition through the ESP'S proprietary lists, "best practices" staff training and consulting, and distribution of over 300,000,000 emails annually.  During the term of its first-year contract with the newspaper in 2015, its publisher announced that it had reached its first profitable year in over three decades attributing this to significantly increasing its digital audience and its “determined effort to remake their company into a digital-first business . . . “.  Other key wins for the ESP in 2015 and 2016 have included email marketing for seven U.S. presidential campaigns.  Over her career, Tommi has been sought after as a speaker on marketing related topics and has been a major presenter at 38 professional association annual meetings.  Among others, her numerous articles have appeared in Higher Education Marketing Journal, Chronicle of Philanthropy, the Direct Marketing Association's Nonprofit Federation Journal and Winning Campaigns magazine. She is also the author of two recruitment-marketing training manuals and six ebooks distributed on Amazon's Kindle store.  Today, she is recognized as an expert in multi-channel marketing with deep experience and knowledge in all aspects of direct mail and email marketing with the latter ranging from template design to spam law compliance to deliverability and sender reputation.  The data assets and lists her businesses offer include over 180 million voter and consumer postal address records, 85 million+ phone numbers and 25 million+ email addresses with millions of individual data points.

Marketing, writing articles and books, coaching and mentoring, advocacy for the organ transplant community, travel, developing recipes and cooking and anything entrepreneurial.