JoAnna French
MIT Sloan School of Management / Westwood School Committee Member
77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge MA 02142
What I Do
I work in communications in higher education. My job is to raise the awareness and understanding of MIT Sloan with current and future business leaders (like you!).
- Job Title: Director, Content Marketing & Special Projects
- Years in Profession: 23
- Job and Daily Responsibilities:
Everyday I get to help folks around MIT Sloan tell what it means to be MIT’s school of management. My team is a disparate but exceeding talented group that oversees the diversity, equity, and inclusion communications work of the school, measures the health of our website with data and analytics, and promotes our faculty research by maintaining faculty profiles and their personal websites. It’s a lot of different areas, but it keeps me on my toes.
I write and edit copy for the mitsloan.edu website and other marketing materials, offer trainings and workshops on various communications strategies (how to use email marketing, how to understand your audience, how to make data-driven decisions…etc), consult with teams around the school to bring MIT Sloan’s work and research into the world.
Education
Worthington Kilbourne High School, Worthington, Ohio
Kent State University (BS in Speech Pathology)
Emerson College, Boston, MA (MA in Global Communications)
Pre-Employment Experience
Interned at a marketing agency in NYC during the summer of my junior year of college
Interned at an ad agency in Boston while in graduate school.
List of classes that are most important/applicable to succeed in your profession:
Writing courses (to become a better writer, you just have to keep writing); Statistics; Logic; Psychology
Advice From A Leader
Understanding your audience and what motivates them to make a decision is the starting point for your interaction with them. Your message is the intersection of your desired outcome, your audience, and your idea.