Donovan Birch Jr

Digital Strategist

Donovan Birch Jr. is a Digital Strategist with more than a decade of experience designing and managing social media, paid media, and integrated digital campaigns for advocacy, philanthropic, and nonprofit organizations. In director and senior roles at the U.S. Energy Foundation, Educators for Excellence, The Leap, Innovate Public Schools, and as an independent consultant, he has led multi-channel programs that combine organic social, paid social, search, email, and web to advance policy goals in education, climate, racial equity and economic justice. His work emphasizes building clear ladders of engagement that move target audiences from initial awareness to repeated advocacy actions.

As Senior Social and Paid Media Lead for this project, Donovan will be responsible for translating First 5 LA’s strategic plan and narrative direction into audience-centered social and paid media strategies. He brings deep experience in building content pillars and editorial calendars, developing targeting and segmentation plans, collaborating with creative teams on asset needs, and partnering with media buyers to paid media campaigns. His approach is highly data-driven: he routinely builds KPI frameworks, tagging and tracking plans, and reporting dashboards that connect digital performance to advocacy and policy outcomes, and uses these insights to refine message frameworks, audience strategies, and investment decisions over time.

Donovan’s management style is collaborative, structured, and supportive. He has managed and mentored cross-functional communications and digital teams, established clear workflows between internal staff and external vendors, and created processes for rapid approvals and coordinated rapid response. On this project he will work as a strategic thought partner to First 5 LA staff, ensuring alignment across narrative change, campaign development, and digital execution, while also building internal capacity to sustain effective, advocacy-focused social and paid media over the life of the strategic plan.