Genia is a marketing strategist at Belwah Media. She’s also a strategic planning consultant at Belwah Strategy and founder of Dane County Masterminds. Genia’s also a design thinking practitioner who helps organizations develop innovative strategies that focus on success through collaborative problem-solving.
For almost 20 years, Genia has supported both for-profit and nonprofit clients with marketing strategy development, strategic planning, business plan development, and community engagement. In 2002, Genia started focusing her grad school research on learning how to develop an advertising network that would deliver targeted advertisements using a women’s blog network. She wanted to know how brands could use women-centric communities to market to women online. Since then, Genia has provided hundreds of clients the marketing strategy development and training services they need to develop their brand, increase sales, and improve their sustainability.
Genia has extensive experience with nonprofit strategic planning and designing digital marketing and social media strategies with a focus on community outreach, community engagement and fundraising. Her marketing agency Belwah Media has been awarded the LGBT Business of the Year Award and is also part of the Forbes Agency Council, an invite-only organization for successful and diverse executives in marketing, PR, media, and advertising.
Genia has provided corporate training and marketing strategy development for clients like Jockey, LPGA, Chicago-Rockford Airport, Nielsen, Equifax, and Whole Foods. Genia wrote the social media training manual for TGI Fridays’ 300+ international restaurants and she’s been cited in publications written by the Federal Communications Commission on matters related to the importance of mobile marketing.
Genia is also a public speaker who’s spoken for over 13 years on topics related to digital marketing trends, social media, entrepreneurship, community media, nonprofit management, Black women in business, and LGBT issues.
Genia is a Forbes columnist and you’ll also find her writing on Business.com, Social Media Today, and Business 2 Community. In 2015, Genia developed and launched BizTechWomen, the first virtual conference using live streaming tools Periscope and Facebook Live. With actress and comedian Kim Coles as keynote speaker, BizTechWomen delivered workshops and presentations live to over 10,000 women entrepreneurs over the course of 4 days.
Currently, Genia is serving as a board member of Collaboration for Good, a communications and capacity building organization with a cross-sector collaboration focus and technology and entrepreneurship expertise. Genia has also joined the board of Foundation for Madison’s Public Schools, with her 3-year term beginning in September 2019. She volunteers 10 hours each month coaching and training nonprofits and social enterprises on marketing, volunteer recruitment and retention, and improving their fundraising strategies. She’s also currently volunteering as a coach for the Social Good Accelerator, a collaborative initiative with the purpose of building ways and means for individuals and organizations that intentionally operate to address inequalities and expand prosperity.
Genia received her Bachelor’s degree from Beloit College (Beloit, WI) and her MBA from Cardinal Stritch University (Milwaukee, WI).
