Hello! I’m Sarah Wagle—creative strategy and content leader at Compassion Intl.
CONTENT STRATEGY
Shaping a central narrative to establish an audience-resonant story.
Channels, funnels, and conversion are important pillars of content development, but they can only reach their full potential if you have a central story to tell. At Compassion, I am currently leading the transformation of disconnected channel content into a strategy driven by a core narrative where engagement and affinity flourish.
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Content marketing is often built around isolated, channel and funnel-specific expressions of video, writing, and design. In the short term, these tactics see momentary gains. Still, without a central narrative for audiences to attach meaningful understanding and affinity to, these strategies often fail to create lasting impact or build real momentum for your brand.
Leading content at Compassion, we have worked tirelessly to move individualized campaigns to a comprehensive, program-backed, and audience-informed brand narrative that creates a vibrant foundation for storytelling. Instead of developing reactive creative against disparate channel plans, we are driving our story consistently and cohesively across channels, creating a compelling and unified experience for our audiences
Methodologies & Skills: Narrative Design, Brand Narrative
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Developing a strong brand narrative requires that you reveal the portion of your story most resonant with those with the strongest likelihood for attachment.
To determine Compassion’s brand narrative we overlayed core principles of our program with audience-resonant themes, then ensured their truth through participant powerclaims to bring to market a narrative that was both true and matched the desires of the market.
Methodologies & Skills: Audience insights, surveys, resonance testing -
By tying every piece of content back to a central theme, you create a cohesive story that's more powerful than the sum of its parts.
DESIGN DEVELOPMENT
Leading design and brand strategy that continues to aid in year over year company growth.
I had the privilege to lead the evolution of the BombBomb brand for the last 5 years, paralleling our visual presence to the growing strategy of the business and ensuring its efficacy with markets and customers. By employing strong visual strategy and development practices, we’ve leveraged collaboration, data and exploration to see design thrive and contribute to 5x growth.
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A good brand is about more than having a good logo. It's about understanding your value, the customers you matter to, and how you can portray intent through well-aligned visuals. By employing shared-belief and trust-driven frameworks, supported by customer data and strong positioning, I've led companies through the strategic evolution of their brands to resonate with customers and generate business profit.
Methodologies & Skills:
Brand Analysis, Personality Development, Shared Values Design, Framework Creation, User Testing, Customer Panels -
Visual development is where creative opportunity meets business strategy. Through collaborative work, design differentiates, represents and connects a business story to the market. Utilizing the creative process of vision-setting, exploration, concepting, testing and refinement, I’ve worked to create visual outcomes that express and flex to match company focus.
Methodologies & Skills:
Visual Exploration, Conceptual Development, Visual Patterns, Design Thinking, Lean Design, Creative Direction, Photoshoots, Production -
Unique creative effort is more necessary to solving business problems than ever before, making wasted design effort more costly than ever. My work leading the adoption and creation of design systems in both product and marketing resulted in a 50% cost reduction in design effort and improved the holistic customer experience across touchpoints. We also achieved greater success with our design partners, and consistent design that spread across the org.
Methodologies & Skills:
Design System Development, Atomic Design, Component Libraries, Marketing and Product Integration, Brand Guidelines
Curious to see these design practices in action?
Read about real projects.
CREATIVE MANAGEMENT
Innovating the creative process to increase velocity and business value.
Creative development is changing. Content teams no longer have an excuse to not be meaningfully connected to audiences, responsive to performance or delivering proven value to the organization. Leading the adoption of Agile and Lean methodologies across organizations, I have helped move creative teams from resourcing staff to valuable business partners with elevated outcomes through proximity to the audience and business problem, and output increased by 70%.
TEAM DEVELOPMENT
Not taking charge, but taking care of those in your charge.
Creative work is only as successful as the team behind it. I believe in building strong and thriving teams and utilizing the full intelligence of each member. I find great joy in helping my teams advance their careers and achieve personal satisfaction by harnessing their individual strengths and aligning them with the needs of the business. By aligning the capabilities and personal strengths of our team members with our goals, we not only drive the growth of our organization but also increase the value we deliver. I take pride in maintaining a 70% A-player rate and achieving a 90% retention rate over the past 5 years.
