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Kafferlin Strategies · CiviLink
Three brands, three voices, one writer keeping them apart
Municipal government, a software product family, and a values-led thought-leadership platform — about as far apart as three audiences get. Same writer, three registers, no bleed between them.
The assignment
Three companies under one roof. Kafferlin Strategies does strategic management planning for Pennsylvania towns and counties — plain, careful, public-record writing. CiviLink is a govtech SaaS family with four products, which needs product marketing. Serve with Purpose is a thought-leadership platform with a podcast, and it needs warmth.
Hired to write. The role expanded past writing within weeks.
Approach
Write the system, then run it. I wrote the social posting specification the whole operation now uses, after standing up the management stack from scratch. The spec is platform-specific on purpose: links move out of the body and into the first comment on LinkedIn and Facebook, because both algorithms suppress posts with body links; hashtag ranges are tuned per platform — a handful on LinkedIn, fewer on Facebook, more on Instagram, where links go right in the caption. Every topic ships as three platform-native variants, not one caption pasted three times.
Match the register to the room. A borough manager reading a fiscal assessment and a marketer scrolling LinkedIn aren’t the same reader. Keeping three brands distinct is mostly a discipline of remembering who you’re talking to.
Build things that survive without me. The product-family identity system ships with a written build guide. The survey instrument ships with documentation the city can maintain. That’s the habit.
What I’ve delivered
- Rebuilt the CiviLink product-family identity system — 15 marks across four products as editable, layer-named SVGs on a fixed palette, plus brand guide and build documentation
- Ran the naming process and wrote launch communications for a product rename
- Wrote and run the social posting specification across five accounts and four platforms; a recurring 16-topic content series built for three platforms
- Produce the Serve with Purpose podcast end to end — edit, audio repair, assembly, and distribution
- Built a 13-question branching resident survey with validated capture for a municipal client, plus a city-branded print parallel for residents answering on paper
- Built call scripts and interview infrastructure for a county engagement spanning 32 department heads and seven interviewers
- Designed and run an AI-assisted classification workflow with an explicit human review gate
Selected samples
Writing that ships with its component
Heidi Ekey
Content Development Specialist
Meet Heidi
“Visual branding… website design… logo iterations… if these are the heart of marketing and sales, copy is the soul. It’s what brings people in for a closer look and gives them a reason to stay. I enjoy creating visually, and I love working with designers and developers — but writing copy is where everything falls into place for me.”
The team page, 23 cards. I wrote every bio, then built the card component that holds them — a 3D flip with a click guard so links inside a card don’t trigger it. Shown here with my own card; the others are stand-ins.
Note on samples
Current client work is shown selectively, and some of it isn’t yet public. The samples above are drawn from prior campaign work of a comparable type. Additional current examples can be shared directly in a conversation.