January 7, 2025
January 7, 2025
Evie Nagy joined Mission North in early February 2020 as a senior director of content and digital strategy. From the moment we hired her, I was energized to see how she’d bring her storytelling and content marketing expertise to the agency.
Content is a key part of our strategy, and to continue making the impact we want to have on our clients’ businesses and on the world at large in this saturated media landscape, we have to take a more integrated approach. Layering content marketing on our media and thought leadership campaigns will extend their reach and amplification, and ultimately, help us better activate audiences around our clients’ stories.
Evie has had a dynamic career that includes time spent speechwriting at Harvard, editing Billboard and Rolling Stone magazines, writing for Fast Company and managing Slack’s editorial and social initiatives. Needless to say, we are thrilled to have her.
In Evie’s first week, it became clear that she brings much more than her impressive writing chops to the agency. She quickly gained a reputation as the world’s most interesting woman, regaling colleagues with stories of high school pranks, a cappella prowess and her experience writing a book about the new wave band Devo.
I sat down with Evie to get to know even more about her fascinating career, her approach to content and digital strategy, and what she hopes to bring to Mission North’s clients.
What brought you to a career in writing?
As a teenager, I edited the high school newspaper and decided at 16 that I really wanted to be a journalist. In college, I went in a different direction and ended up working in education for a long time. I was an administrator at Harvard for about six years and did speechwriting for several executives. During that time I went to Turkey to teach English for a year, and I started blogging because I found it very therapeutic. This was during the heyday of blogging, in the early 2000s, and I would write about my life with a sort of absurdist humor. It really helped me remember why I loved writing so much.
When I returned to Harvard to continue my work, I had an epiphany — maybe you’d call it a quarter-life-crisis — and realized that 16-year-old me was right: I wanted to be a writer. I went back to school and studied journalism at NYU. I went on to work at Billboard Magazine, Rolling Stone and then Fast Company. After spending a few years writing about the tech industry at Fast Company, I decided I wanted to write for the tech industry. That’s how I ended up at Slack. I applied there because I loved the product and it had already made a big difference in my life as a remote worker.
What kind of work did you do at Slack? Is there an initiative you’re most proud of?
I started out doing copywriting for the marketing department, and went on to build up their content marketing program. One of the projects I’m most proud of is how we evolved the company blog. We really expanded the top-of-funnel content to be about the larger topic of how people work together. Product education was still a big part of it, but we also wanted to build on the grassroots way Slack grew and engage all of its fans.
The blog became this fun way to embrace the idea that how people work together is incredibly important. I got to run the blog like you would a magazine, with a large network of freelance writers that would pitch me article ideas. We were able to source stories from all over the country, not just in our Silicon Valley bubble, and I think that resonated with a lot of people.
Companies should ask themselves what they know best and where they can inject real value. What does your audience truly need now and how can you provide it?
What does a strong integrated content and digital strategy look like for companies right now?
It’s more important than ever for brands to provide a resource to their audience that involves more than just talking about the product. People get information from so many different sources. If a company has something truly valuable to offer its audience, a digital and content strategy will allow them to connect and engage with them. This is an opportunity to be part of a wider conversation and associate a brand with smart ideas that are relevant to the industry or community.
Companies should ask themselves what they know best and where they can inject real value. What does your audience truly need now and how can you provide it? This strategy should be channel-agnostic. Brands need to go wherever their audience is and provide value in a way that fits that medium.
What stood out to you about Mission North’s approach to content?
Even before I joined Mission North, I really admired the fact that the agency has brought together so many people who have dedicated their lives to writing, who have been great journalists and editors. That has created a group of people who understand where the media is coming from but, more importantly, understand how to tell stories from an audience perspective in addition to a business perspective.
What impressed me when I joined was the deep subject matter expertise across the Content Studio and the entire agency. Having people with a deep understanding of Trust or Fintech or Adtech is invaluable to clients, the audiences they’re speaking to and our internal teams.
Whose work do you admire?
I really admire writers who tackle deeply human issues with a lot of humor. There’s nothing more impressive to me than sharp social commentary that makes you laugh while also making you uncomfortable. That is a talent I have so much admiration for.
Samantha Irby is a writer who can pull that off. She has incredible social commentary but in a way that’s very personal and relatable. I’m reading her new collection of essays, Wow, No Thank You.
And then there’s someone like Alexandra Petri, who writes satirical columns for The Washington Post. She was the youngest writer to ever have a column there. Her writing is scathing and intensely critical but also gut-bustingly funny. She’s one of the best satirists I’ve read in my life.
What’s one way you bring your “whole self” to work?
I am a very extroverted person, and sometimes that means I have a limited filter. You learn what kind of person I am pretty quickly. As a colleague, I’m very open and will always share an embarrassing moment or a weird fact, that’s just how I engage with people — but I always try to be professional at the same time, of course.
As soon as I joined Mission North, I found a very friendly atmosphere where people engage with each other in very human ways. So I’m able to be myself at work and interact with coworkers in the same way I would with friends.
