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 the system and the story stay in sync instead of drifting apart over time.

Who I work best with: mission-driven nonprofits and community organizations (arts and culture, libraries, membership associations) without a dedicated ops or comms person on staff. If you're migrating systems, launching a new program, or watching your communications drift from your mission, that's the kind of problem I like.

See the four ways I help

Registration & membership setup

Picking, implementing, or cleaning up the platform that runs your programs. I've done this from the 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. That includes building repeatable frameworks for capturing real stories from staff, members, and donors, so the storytelling doesn't run dry six months in.

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.

Background

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 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 and planning more than 150 email and program campaigns along the way.

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.

Case studies

A few examples

62% average open rate
33,000+ members supported
150+ campaigns launched

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 a 62% average open rate, nearly double the 25–40% industry benchmark for organizations this size.

Read how the strategy evolved

When single-program emails started pulling click-through rates up (from 2.5% to 4%) but taking unsubscribes 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 board-ready recommendation to switch providers, projected to cut the monthly bill by roughly 41% while adding the automation and reporting features the old platform lacked.

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.

Read how the launch came together

A program launch was never just a listing going up. When the fitness centre introduced new adaptive equipment and needed people with disabilities, injury recovery clients, seniors, neurodivergent members, and pre and postnatal clients to feel like the launch was actually for them, I built a six channel campaign instead of a single email announcement: member and prospect email streams with separate calls to action for tours versus training sessions, a short social video series, an accessibility forward landing page, in facility signage with QR codes, geo targeted digital ads within a 20 kilometre radius, and a community press release. Every channel had a specific target set before a single asset went live, from email open rate to booked tours and fit starts, so the launch was accountable from day one instead of judged after the fact.

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

Designed an internal AI copywriting assistant by loading the organization's brand guidelines, marketing strategy, and a structured storytelling framework into a custom GPT's instructions, then testing and refining its guidance until it reliably produced consistent email, social and promotional copy without messaging drifting out of voice.

Read how the tool was built

Building the tool meant translating documents that live in people's heads and shared drives, brand guidelines, a marketing strategy, a storytelling framework, into instructions specific enough for an AI tool to apply consistently. That meant defining not just what the brand sounded like, but what to avoid: generic marketing language, forced inclusion language, clichés. Once it was working, it got used across day-to-day production and larger campaigns alike: turning transcripts and rough notes into narrative led emails while keeping every fact intact, and reviewing existing communications for tone and consistency before they went out.

That same builder-first approach, prototyping with AI rather than spec'ing everything out up front, later carried over into redesigning a complex email marketing SOP, restructuring it for clarity and workflow while preserving every operational detail the team relied on.

Standardized how creative work gets requested and scoped

Designed and built a marketing intake system in Wrike for a multi-site organization, covering everything from campaign objectives and creative specs to approval workflows and launch timelines in one structured request form. It replaced ad hoc requests with a process people could actually follow, with clear expectations between departments and the marketing team.

That same instinct for testing before committing carried over here too: the form logic and workflow were refined before a single real request went through it.