Later Career

Later recruited to serve as National Director of State Initiatives for the oldest and largest academic mentoring company, and subsequently appointed Special Advisor to the Chairman of the Board, she assisted with its transition to an e-learning company and in building a nationwide government relations infrastructure, Tommi successfully cultivated relationships with legislators from 28 target states.

She also won the support of California’s governor, first lady, commissioner of education and leaders of both the state senate and state assembly for a company sponsored initiative.  This influence coupled with the strategic marketing program she developed contributed to passage of a $200 million appropriation toward K-12 reading and math programs.  This provided funds to the schools that they could opt to use to obtain the company’s products and services.

The passage of an appropriations bill, subsequently signed into law by the governor, was considered a remarkable achievement in light of California’s budget crisis at the time.  Significant appropriation bills were also passed and signed into law under her term of leadership in Ohio and Texas.

Tommi went on to serve in senior management at Vertis Communications, one of the largest multi-channel marketing companies in the world, and as Vice President Development & Marketing of the direct marketing division of public company SourceCorp, Inc.  In both corporate roles, she was recruited to develop and launch a nonprofit sales vertical.  At Vertis, early national account wins included Easter Seals, Compassion International, Feed the Children, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Easter Seals, Muscular Dystrophy Association, American Cancer Society, Special Olympics and United Negro College Fund among many others.

At SourceCorp, the new vertical she launched and managed, enhanced the acquisition value of the direct marketing division which was successfully sold per plan following the 12th month of implementation. This included writing and implementing a national marketing plan for the segment, developing a lead program for the sales force generating 500+ high-value segment leads and ultimately achieving business unit growth at 250% above industry average.

Since 2005, Tommi has owner-managed a digital marketing and data company, American Information Marketing, LLC (“AIM”).  The company serves the political, nonprofit and commercial markets with marketing data (mailing lists) and turn-key email marketing and direct mail services as well as online media placement.

In late 2014, along with continued management of AIM, she co-founded and has served as a managing partner of an email service provider (ESP), Populus Digital Marketing, LLC.  Not long thereafter, Populus was awarded a contract to manage the email operation of the Washington Times, a respected daily newspaper in the nation’s capital seeking to build a national digital footprint.

The contract included distributing advertiser emails and its daily news alerts totaling an average of 30,000,000 emails monthly.  Responsibilities also included helping to optimize email performance, to assist with building circulation to support advertising sales, to help build up subscriptions for its national digital edition and to provide “best practices” staff training.

Just a few months after taking over the newspaper’s email operation management, its CEO announced that it had reached its FIRST profitable year in over three decades attributing this to significantly increasing its digital audience and its “determined effort to remake their company into a digital-first business . . . “noting that this included email.

Other key wins for the ESP in 2015 and 2016 have included email marketing for seven U.S. presidential campaigns.

Over her career, Tommi has been sought after as a speaker on marketing related topics and has been a major presenter at 38 professional association annual meetings.  Among others, her numerous articles have appeared in Higher Education Marketing Journal, Chronicle of Philanthropy, the Direct Marketing Association’s Nonprofit Federation Journal and Winning Campaigns magazine. She is also the author of two recruitment-marketing training manuals and six ebooks distributed on Amazon’s Kindle store.

Today, she is recognized as an expert in multi-channel marketing with deep experience and knowledge in all aspects of direct mail and email marketing with the latter ranging from template design to spam law compliance to deliverability and sender reputation.  The data assets and lists her businesses offer include over 180 million voter and consumer postal address records, 85 million+ phone numbers and 25 million+ email addresses with millions of individual data points.