High Tech Experience
Non-Profit Experience
Community Experience
Alexander/Swift Associates Projects
High Tech Experience
As a former senior editor and columnist for Web Review magazine and veteran of several start ups, Kirsten has deep roots in the high tech community. She has worked with a wide range of clients, from companies targeting a specific business-to-business market segment to non-profit organizations seeking to build awareness within a specific geographic or demographic community.
Having worked on many products still in the early concept phase, Kirsten has learned how to work closely with engineering teams to build an environment of mutual trust and respect where products are specified and built to meet customers’ needs and internal realities.
Prior to starting her own company, Kirsten served as Director of Marketing for Open Ratings, taking the company from launch through its second round of funding. Open Ratings provides predictive ratings of supplier performance to Fortune 500 clients and sells joint offerings with Dun & Bradstreet. At Open Ratings, Kirsten was the first person the MIT-based founders hired.
Kirsten has managed outreach initiatives at hundreds of conferences and events across the country and internationally, including high profile launch venues such as PC Forum. She has extensive experience in developing exhibits, creating brochures and Web sites, press relations, direct mail, effective PowerPoint presentations, and managing the design process. Alexander/Swift uses a network of talented, reasonably priced, and proven vendors to support these efforts.
Current and recent high tech clients include:
- MessageMachines, which offers cross-device messaging applications to enterprise customers and telco/softswitch vendors
- MetaCarta, which adds geographic mapping to knowledge management systems.
Non-Profit Experience
Current and recent non-profit clients include:
- Baltimore-based Annie E. Casey Foundation, a national $3 billion grant-making organization that focuses on supporting children and their families
- The Women's Union, a 125-year old Boston non-profit that focuses on issues and programs regarding women, the family and the economy.
- The Organization of Pakistani Entrepreneurs (OPEN), a high-tech professional association started by a well-connected group of Pakistani-American entrepreneurs
Among her volunteer activities, Kirsten serves on the Board of Directors of Virtually Wired, which focuses on ending the digital divide in Boston and is the high tech representative to the Advisory Board of Boston CareerLink, located in Roxbury.
Long active in building Boston’s Internet community, Kirsten co-founded Boston Webgrrls in 1995, helping the local chapter transform into Digital Eve in 2000; and was on the Boston chapter Board of the Webmasters’ Guild. Kirsten honed her skills as a launch specialist during her early career, which she spent as an account executive in entertainment public relations in New York, specializing in Oscar campaigns, foreign films, and film festivals.
As a member of the Junior League of Boston, Kirsten has spent many Saturday mornings over the last year doing art projects with students at the Boston Renaissance Charter School, including chairing the session on photography. During the 2001-2002 school year, she was a volunteer mentor at the Mellon Academy for Girls at Morgan Memorial Goodwill.
An active member since 1996, she is currently the Vice President of the Jones Hill Civic Association, and has worked on voter registration, creating a Poet Laureate program, greenspace, and housing.
Community Experience
Building community through Internet technologies is a strength of Alexander/Swift Associates.
Kirsten Alexander served as the Editorial Director of CommonPlaces during the launch of its acclaimed portal for college students and the company’s merger with the largest college marketing company in the US, YouthStream Media Networks.
While the company was owned by Fidelity, Kirsten served in critical marketing, product development, and strategic alliance roles for Community Newspaper Company's award-winning interactive group and its site, Town Online.
In the last year, Kirsten has successfully written two grants for community-based projects, including The Peace Project, which takes a comprehensive, resident-driven look at the intersections of different kinds of violence and their effects on the Uphams Corner area community. Kirsten developed the project after observing the segmentation of anti-violence programs provided by community based organizations and realizing that residents were still frustrated at the lack of options around preventing violence in our hearts, homes, streets, and the broader world. Building on her knowledge of programs across the country, she developed a resident-driven project and won a $4,000 grant with which to implement it.
With more than a dozen under her belt, Kirsten has become a specialist in setting up and managing private project-based listservs and collaborative file-sharing online spaces using the simple (and free) Yahoo! Groups.
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