Emily Halprin Lee

Hi, I'm Emily. I've spent my career on the two sides most people keep separate: the systems that support a program and the words that explain it to everyone else.

How I help

Two things, done well together

Most people are good at one side. The systems side: registration platforms, workflows, the unglamorous plumbing that keeps a program running. Or the communications side: the emails, the web copy, the voice that actually makes people show up.

I do both. I've implemented a registration system from the ground up, and written the campaigns that filled it. That combination is rare, and it means nothing gets lost in translation between the people who build the system and the people who have to explain it to everyone else.

Who I work best with: mission-driven nonprofits and community organizations, arts and culture, community foundations, libraries, membership associations, who don't have a dedicated ops or comms person on staff. If you're migrating systems, launching a new program, documenting a process that only lives in one person's head, or your communications don't sound like your mission anymore, that's the kind of problem I like.

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Registration & membership setup

Picking, implementing, or cleaning up the platform that runs your programs. I've done this ground up with Club Automation, onboarding, day to day sales, process documentation and coordinating launches across departments, so your team isn't relying on one person's memory to keep things running.

Email system & automation

Updating or reorganizing your email platform (built out with ActiveCampaign, Constant Contact, or Mailchimp), segmenting your lists by membership type, program interest, and engagement level, and building onboarding, renewal, and nurture sequences that used to eat up someone's whole week.

Brand voice & style guide

Defining what your organization sounds like in writing and documenting it so anyone on your team, or an AI tool, can write in that voice consistently without you rewriting every email or piece of website copy that goes out.

Program launch & campaign management

Coordinating a registration launch or campaign across the people who run the program and the people who explain it to your community, so nothing drops in the handoff.

Results

Where this comes from

I didn't set out to end up here. I started out studying how communities form and stay connected, and somewhere along the way, that turned into a career spent watching the same question play out in practice: whether the systems and the words describing them work together, or don't.

Most recently, I led marketing and communications for a nonprofit community organization, working across the systems and the messaging built on top of them.

A few examples:

Rebuilt the email system from the ground up

The organization's email list was one undifferentiated group. I implemented ActiveCampaign, reorganized contacts by membership type, program interest, and engagement level, and built automations for onboarding, renewal reminders, and program specific nurture sequences, turning manual one-off sends into a system that ran itself.

That system now sustains an average open rate in the low 60s, nearly double the 25–40% industry benchmark for organizations this size.

Ran the system behind the programs

Implemented and operated Club Automation as the organization's program registration and membership platform, handling onboarding, day to day program sales and prioritization, and coordinated registration launches across fitness and arts and culture programming so that launches stopped depending on one person's knowledge.

The platform now supports registration and scheduling for more than 33,000 community members across two locations.

Built an AI tool trained on the brand's own voice

Designed an internal AI copywriting assistant trained on the organization's brand guidelines and tone, giving a busy team a way to produce more content without messaging drifting out of voice.

Earlier, I managed vendor relationships and wrote product copy for a national retail brand's online catalogue, and coordinated national research studies for a data and research firm, including compliant handling of personal information and training documentation for new team members.

Read the fuller stories

When single-program emails started pulling click-through rates up (from 2.5% to 4%) but pulling unsubscribes up right along with them, I built a segmentation strategy to fix it rather than just accept the tradeoff: a short self-segmentation survey to learn what people actually wanted, a phased rollout starting with the most engaged members, and simple send rules (no more than two program emails a week, a minimum gap between sends) to stop fatigue before it started.

When the existing email platform started to feel like it was working against the team rather than for them, I ran a structured evaluation across nine providers, shortlisted two, and tested both with real campaigns before recommending a change. The result was a platform switch that would cut the monthly bill by roughly 41% while adding the automation and reporting features the old platform lacked.