Frances Eugenia Collazo

Strategic communicator, creative director, and systems thinker.

I work where communications, design, and organizational structure meet.

Since 2012, I have worked across municipal government, media, publishing, cultural programming, real estate, retail, and other public-facing work. The industries change. The problem is often some version of the same one: information has become scattered, responsibilities are unclear, too much depends on individual memory, or people are improvising around systems that stopped working a long time ago.

I tend to look past the requested deliverable. A flyer may actually be a calendar problem. A website problem may actually be that nobody is responsible for keeping it current. An inconsistent newsletter may be the visible symptom of an approval process nobody has ever clearly defined. I look at the programs, audiences, obligations, people, timelines, and decisions surrounding the work, figure out what matters first, and build from there.

That can mean policies, messaging, publications, campaigns, visual systems, workflows, editorial structures, or an entire communications function.

At the City of Cleveland Heights, I built and led the City’s first formal Communications Department. The work included department structure and workflows, public information, newsletters and publications, visual standards, executive and issue communications, event campaigns, and systems for moving information across departments without everything depending on whoever happened to know what was going on.

I hold a BA in Public Relations from Loyola University New Orleans and completed a certificate in Futures Studies and Speculative Design through Parsons School of Design at The New School. The two disciplines make sense together to me. Communications asks what people need to understand now. Futures work asks what is changing around us, what assumptions we are carrying forward, and what we should build before the old way stops working.

I believe people know when they are being informed and when they are being pandered to. Clear information and serious design are both forms of respect.

My goal is not to make an organization permanently dependent on me. I clean up the communications environment, build what is missing, and leave the people doing the work with tools and practices they can actually maintain.