Grayce Payne is the Marketing Coordinator on the Brand & Communications team, and she joined EA in 2022. She originally started at EA as an intern on the Impact team and transitioned to her full-time role in June 2023. Grayce is from Hartland, Michigan, and attended Utah Tech University.
How would you describe your role on the Brand & Communications team?
I’m the Marketing Coordinator on the Brand & Communications team and I work closely with our Director of Brand & Communications Marlena Holden and our Brand & Communications Assistant Evan Wooldridge. In my role as Marketing Coordinator, I provide support with internal and external communication efforts at Education Analytics (EA), which includes helping to design and publish content across EA’s social media platforms, managing and creating content for EA’s external and internal newsletters, collaborating across teams at EA to prepare conference materials and content, creating and maintaining content on EA’s website, and much more! The Brand & Communications team is fairly new to EA (established in April 2023), so we are always finding new ways to provide brand and communications support to EA staff and partner organizations.
What interested you in working at EA?
I found EA when I was searching for a summer internship opportunity in 2022. I had a previous internship working for a non-profit organization, so I knew I wanted to continue working in the non-profit space, just in a new industry. When I saw that EA was hiring a Marketing & Social Media Intern, I looked more into EA as an organization, and I was drawn to their focus on uplifting and empowering educators and students. I didn’t have any previous experience working in the education data and analytics space, so I was nervous about applying for the role, but ultimately, I was excited about the prospect of challenging myself to learn more about a new field. Now, in my full-time role, two years later, I get to see every day how the passion, dedication, and expertise of our staff enables us to follow through on our mission of improving outcomes for students and the education system as a whole.
We know that every day is different, but what would a typical day at EA look like for you?
My typical day involves hopping between a variety of projects for both internal and external communication needs. The Brand & Communications team at EA supports various teams across the organization, and one area includes conference support. My role typically involves designing custom materials, sourcing branded items, and supporting presentations.
I also dedicate a portion of my day to various design projects, which can vary depending on the time of year. This includes creating visuals for internal and external presentations, blog posts, newsletters, social media posts, and staff-wide events. I’ll also spend time reviewing our social media analytics, engaging with posts from our partner organizations and other non-profit EdTech companies that we follow, and making sure our daily post is scheduled and ready to publish across our platforms. We almost always have one or two blogs in the works at any given time, so I will also spend time reviewing and editing blogs or uploading the blog content to our website so that it’s ready to be published. I am also responsible for adding, updating, and maintaining content on our website, so I usually spend time making sure staff pages, blogs, and other website content is up to date.
What skills do you possess that you find helpful in your role?
Creativity is essential to my role and to the success of the Brand & Communications team as a whole. The bulk of the work I do in my role as the Marketing Coordinator involves creating imagery or graphics for sometimes complex and hard to capture concepts like interoperability, Ed-Fi, and data warehousing. This requires me to experiment with different ways to visually present these concepts in a simplified way, while still highlighting their complexity.
Being able to collaborate with others is also an important skill in the work we do on the Brand & Communications team. We rely on the expertise and feedback of individuals across EA – analysts, engineers, partner strategists, product leaders – to ensure that the internal and external communications and projects that we are working on accurately convey the work EA is doing in the data and analytics space. Much of our work necessitates that we receive multiple rounds of feedback on design work, blogs, press releases, and presentations, so we must be enthusiastic and receptive to edits and feedback that our team members have. Especially with design work, I routinely seek feedback and edits from my team and staff across EA. Since I often spend days or even weeks on a single design, having fresh perspectives is always appreciated.
What is the most rewarding aspect of your role?
I think the most rewarding aspect of my role is helping to bring people’s visions and ideas to life. A lot of the work we do on the Brand & Communications team involves collaborating with other teams to turn their ideas into tangible items like a presentation, a handout, or a visual that communicates shared values. We have the pleasure of working with many creative and innovative folks at EA, so I appreciate the diverse range of suggestions that people bring when we work with them. I enjoy the back-and-forth flow of feedback as we work on these projects because it enables me to balance technical diagrams and descriptions with eye-catching and energizing design work. It’s always gratifying to hear how EA staff, partner organizations, and even conference attendees engage with the design/branding work we create.
What is your favorite project that you’ve worked on at EA?
I have so many favorite projects, so it’s difficult to narrow it down to just one, so I’m picking two! The first project, which is more of an ongoing process, is developing our conference strategy. We attend and present at conferences year-round, so it became apparent when the Brand & Communications team formed last year that we needed to figure out a more detailed system for all things conferences. Director of Brand & Communications Marlena Holden built out a Conference Tracking board on Monday.com for our team to use to track important information related to conferences, including proposal due dates, sponsorship opportunities, timelines for shipping materials, and more. This board has been instrumental in enabling us to keep track of all the important elements related to our conference strategy. I must also give a huge shoutout to Office Administrative Assistant Emily Arneson for her help in registering EA staff for conferences and securing travel and lodging accommodations for these trips. I also want to thank our Office Manager Anna Geisthardt for her shipping and packaging expertise, our conference materials always arrive on time and in great condition thanks to her!
We also work closely with our Business Development team to ensure that we’re attending relevant conferences that will enable us to properly connect with partner organizations, educators and administrators, district leaders, and potential partners. Seeing how our conference strategy has strengthened over the past year or so through this cross-team collaboration has been incredibly gratifying.
My second favorite project has been the “Pets of EA” calendar. The idea of the calendar came from our Program Operations Manager Kale Mabin, who designed the calendar for several years before I started working here, so all credit is due to Kale for this project! I took on the responsibility of creating the 2024 calendar late last year and I enjoy the whole process so much! Designing the calendar was a fun and creative challenge and I loved getting to see everyone’s adorable pets. I’m very excited to start designing the 2025 calendar!
If you had to choose a different team to work on at EA, which team would you pick and why?
If I had to pick a different team to work on, I would work on the Administrative Services team. The Brand & Communications team already works closely with the Admin Services team, but I would love to learn more about the full scope of the work they do. The Admin Services team, which includes Emily Arneson, Jessie Gallagher, Anna Geisthardt, Annie Kime, and Krys Parsons, is made up of absolute powerhouses so I would appreciate the opportunity to learn from them. I would also love to learn about the everyday work that goes into maintaining our office space, planning in-person events, answering travel or office questions, and so much more!
What is something you enjoy in your free time?
In my free time, I enjoy visiting my local thrift stores, baking, listening to podcasts, going to concerts, sampling matcha lattes from different coffee shops in Madison, going to the movies (specifically on discount Tuesdays), attending UW-Madison women’s hockey games, and having craft nights with my friends! I also really enjoy going to weekly trivia nights with my friends, even though I am quite bad at trivia unless the questions focus on movies, music, or pop culture, but I still find it very fun!
When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a variety of different things – a chef, a ballerina, a teacher, a dolphin trainer, and I’m sure there are many more careers that I dreamed of having as a kid! Once I started high school, I began to find my footing in English and creative writing courses, so I knew I wanted to do something that allowed me to utilize my writing and editing skills. I didn’t get involved in the design realm until college, and that’s when I realized I wanted to pursue a career that enabled me to create written and visual elements.
What is something that you would tell your younger self about your career?
I would tell my younger self that it’s okay not to know everything and that you will develop certain skills through time, patience, and practice. I think I wanted to know everything because I was nervous to admit when I wasn’t familiar with a certain skill or subject matter. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become a lot more comfortable asking for help when I need it and asking for clarification or an explanation when I don’t know or understand something. I would much rather ask for help from my talented and knowledgeable team members as opposed to struggling in silence with certain subject matter or with a certain project. Nowadays, I see asking for help and admitting when you don't know something as quite courageous!