Kathleen Patten -  Volunteer Faculty at the Leadership Institute

With 35+ years of experience in direct response marketing and fundraising, Kathleen not only manages America’s largest and oldest conservative direct marketing agency, American Target Advertising and its businesses, but directly oversees direct mail and online fundraising programs and grassroots mobilization for its clients.

Her clients have ranged from Conservative nonprofits, charities, colleges, candidates, PACS, and Republican Party Committees. 

Kathleen helps clients build large organizations, whether start-ups with little or no donor base, or established organizations that wish to expand their number of supporters and effectiveness nationally. With a background in copywriting, Kathleen specializes in client branding and marketing strategy, working with clients to help identify and strengthen their position (hole in the marketplace), differentiation, USP, the benefit they offer their donors and supporters, and their overall brand. She helps organizations identify and build their brand and develop new projects that match the mission and goals of the organization with the interests and needs of their donors and potential donors. Then she personally drives the integrated marketing campaigns to help maximize the impact of these programs.

Kathleen has the unique experience of working both on the agency side and non-profit side of marketing and fundraising, having spent ten years at America’s then-largest conservative alternative to AARP building its membership to over 500,000 dues-paying households annually.  There Kathleen oversaw direct mail, telephone, and internet marketing, as well as membership benefits and services, the newsletters and publications, grassroots mobilization, national polling, and public relations. This holistic view of nonprofit management, accounting, and program implementation allows Kathleen to make an organization’s fundraising and grassroots mobilization efforts all the more successful for her clients.

Kathleen holds a Master’s Degree in Public Administration from George Mason University where she concentrated on Nonprofit Management, as well as a Bachelors of Business Administration from the College of William and Mary, where for several years she served on the Business Partners Board for the Mason School of Business. She lives in Manassas, Virginia.

Kathleen Patten