January 7, 2025
January 7, 2025
2022 was a wild ride. Despite the rollercoaster from massive funding rounds and IPOs, and gloomy predictions of a recession, our team held strong and delivered our most creative, strategic and impactful work to date. We enter 2023 with 17% year-over-year growth and a positive outlook for what promises to be another year of the unexpected.
Our 2022 highlights included:
Executive and Senior Leadership Appointments
We have an ambitious vision to elevate the role of strategic communications and the impact of our work. We have been reflecting on the core leadership team structure we need to lead us through this next evolution of Mission North. With this vision in mind, we’re excited to announce the following appointments within our executive team:
Nicole Messier has been appointed President. Nicole is an inspirational people manager, a trusted client partner and brand strategist. As President, she will be responsible for all aspects of growth for our business, overseeing brand and taking on new responsibilities across business development, product and strategy. We have ambitious goals with regards to our brand reputation, portfolio design and revenue and profitability goals, and Nicole is the activator we need to lead us into another phase of growth.
Gillian Davis has been appointed Chief People Officer. Gillian has made an outsized impact on our business, culture and employee happiness as a driving force behind our award-winning employee experience. Mission North’s annual pay equity survey, comprehensive career path resources, LinkedIn Learning program for managers and executive coaching program for senior leaders, and our progressive employee benefits are just a handful of her many contributions. As Chief People Officer, she will continue to be a chief advocate for our people while leading our talent brand and leadership coaching functions.
Shannon Hutto has been appointed Chief Client Officer. Over the past 15 years, Shannon has worn many different hats to help grow Mission North from a boutique firm to a globally recognized midsize agency. In her new role, she will set our client success vision and standards of excellence, and lead the design of new systems aimed at delighting our clients with services and results that exceed their expectations. She’s on a mission to ensure every client is a reference and vocal champion that views Mission North as a long-term strategic partner.
In addition, we are thrilled to announce the following appointments across our senior leadership team:
Meghan Gardner has been appointed EVP and General Manager. As our West Coast GM, Meghan’s focus is on maximizing agency profitability, efficiency and employee engagement through strategic collaboration with HR, finance and senior leadership. She has been promoted into EVP, reflecting her role as senior most counsel on enterprise technology accounts, including leadership of the Future Stack practice and oversight of clients within Trust, Future of Work and Sustainability. Meghan will continue her agency-wide leadership of our Client Success team.
Grace Emery has been appointed SVP and General Manager. As our East Coast GM, Grace’s focus is on honing our systems and making an outstanding impact through her attention to staff development balanced against the changing dynamics and needs of our clients. In 2023, she will continue to own staff development, and drive account management best practices to ensure we are running efficient and effective teams. In addition to her GM role, Grace will continue her leadership of clients in our Fintech, Future Stack and Future of Work practices, and co-lead the Fintech Practice.
Melissa Musiker has been appointed EVP and Head of Strategy. This promotion reflects Melissa’s leadership growing our Life Sciences practice and impacting other Mission North portfolios with strategy counsel. Melissa has built an innovative tools stack and strategic services menu, and leads her teams to data-driven insights in new business and campaign work, showcasing how integrated work can be closely tied to a client's business impact. In her new role, Melissa will continue to oversee our Life Sciences practice, and will work to scale our Integration Studio work to support Mission North in becoming a best-in-class digital agency. Melissa will also partner with account leads to take her strategy leadership to the entire portfolio.
Other Key Milestones:
We are solving big problems with 22 new client partners. With our Consumer and Sustainability practices, we welcomed some incredible brands to join our portfolio, including the indoor vertical farming company Plenty, which fits into both practices. We also recently welcomed Totus Medicines, an innovative drug discovery company tackling untreatable diseases, Ballistic Ventures, a cybersecurity focused venture capital firm, and streaming analytics company Conviva. Other clients joining our portfolio in 2022 include Shippo, Outreach, Norwest Venture Partners, Benchling, ASAPP, Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Sentry, Element Biosciences, Celonis, Ascend.io and Alloy.
<split-lines>"With our Consumer and Sustainability practices, we welcomed some incredible brands to join our portfolio..."<split-lines>
We grew our integrated services footprint. This past year, our client partners leaned in with us to elevate their stories and better target their narratives to audiences across channels. We’re incredibly proud of nearly 50% growth across our digital services, social media campaigns and thought leadership content that positions ambitious brands to achieve their business goals. At the end of 2022, the team also celebrated a huge win in renewable energy. This multimillion-dollar, four-year contract is a great example of how we’re delivering integrated strategies and programs that target audiences to drive advocacy on important issues like climate change.
We became a benefit corporation. This milestone marked a huge step in our efforts to make a broader societal and environmental impact. This legal tool weaves corporate social responsibility into the fabric of our company and ensures that our work benefits every Mission North stakeholder, including our people, our customers, our community and our environment.
We surpassed $1.5 million in grants and pro bono services. Launched in 2016, our corporate social responsibility program, E3thos, commits 2% of our time, profits and owner equity to nonprofits that work toward empowerment, equality and bettering the environment. Our grant recipients this year included Green City Force, Transition House, Washington English Center, City Harvest, World Central Kitchen and the Committee to Protect Journalists. In addition, we continued our strategic partnerships with Kiva.org, the San Francisco Education Fund and Big Brothers Big Sisters of NYC.
We advanced our Diversity, Belonging and Equity work. We launched new programs designed to create more pathways to leadership for historically excluded individuals, including our Sponsorship program designed to elevate diverse colleagues with leadership potential. We also kicked off “The Future is...Fellowship,” our inaugural scholarship and fellowship initiative in partnership with the Public Relations Society of America to create more pathways to leadership for BIPOC women. (You can read more about it in this Dispatch post.)
