Executive summary:
- Vice President at the Antenna Group
- Lead the marketing and public relations for the launch of Dandelion, a geothermal heating & cooling startup, in 2017
- Increased awareness of solar+battery’s benefits and driving adoption while collaborating with SunRun
- Worked at Mosaic in Oakland, California
What is your field of expertise?
My field of expertise is marketing and public relations for the cleantech sector.
Describe your journey to where you are today.
Katie Durham (Ullmann)
I first learned about climate change when I saw the documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” in 2006. I was in high school and it completely shook me and oriented the direction of my career. I spent the bulk of my time in highschool and college leading environmental activist groups. We did some great work, including instituting better recycling programs at my high school (Brookline High School in Massachusetts), creating a fund for clean energy projects on my college campus (Vanderbilt University in Tennessee), and pressuring the U.S. government to put the kibosh on the Keystone XL pipeline.
After college, I worked at a startup called Mosaic in Oakland, California that was crowdsourcing investments for solar projects. I quickly learned that activism skills transfer pretty closely to marketing and public relations skills in the business world. In the decade since, I’ve worked for various companies that are deploying clean energy technologies, including solar, heat pumps, and energy management software. As a Vice President at Antenna, I have the privilege of managing teams and overseeing efforts for dozens of cleantech companies at once, helping move forward multiple legs of the cleantech sector.
What does your company do, for who, and how does it fit into the bigger picture of solving global issues with clean tech?
I’m a Vice President at the Antenna Group, an integrated marketing, public relations, digital and creative agency. Our cleantech practice works with companies that are leveraging technology to make the energy sector cleaner and more resilient. We help our clients grow their businesses by providing strategic counsel on how best to reach their target audiences and executing for them through press, social media, advertisements, events and more. As our clients’ businesses grow, their impact grows. I love that our work is pivotal in powering that impact.
What do you wish you could tell the younger you – what would’ve been incredibly helpful to you ten years ago?
I would tell my younger self to slow down, ask more questions, and have faith in the long-term fruits of my labor.
LinkedIn: Katie Durham (Ullmann)