Direct Development

Our Story

At DD, we’ve always been helping the underdogs do things they cannot do on their own. Our roots began in the nonprofit world, back in the 80’s when faith-based charities needed a lot of help with direct marketing communications to raise much-needed funds to support their missions. Over the next few decades, DD expanded into the higher education space to serve schools with creative and innovative marketing tactics that attracted students and alumni. We moved from being single-channel direct mail providers to multi-channel marketing gurus by the end of the first decade of the 21st century...but something still wasn’t right.

We realized that the marketing and communications industry was being drastically disrupted, and people were engaging with content in ways that required new thinking, new technology, and an entirely new approach to marketing. The old strategies and tactics weren’t working, even though many “thought leaders” were preaching the opposite.

In 2014, we made the decision to start over and completely reinvent ourselves. We chose to focus exclusively on the education and nonprofit industries, and we built our agency services around what people need tomorrow, instead of around what we could already do today.

We knew we were fast. We knew we loved helping schools and nonprofits do more with less. And we knew how to make any complicated mar-tech strategy easy to understand and execute. So we adapted and improved and built a new team of storytellers, smart creatives, and marketing technologists — all of whom were hell-bent on achieving one common mission for every person and organization we partnered with: to help them slay their giants. That’s why…

We help Davids beat Goliaths.

What We Believe

There are too many choices available, and more channels is not always better. Quality is more important than quantity. Making smart choices requires education, data, and experimentation. You don’t have to outspend in order to outperform. Overcoming your biggest challenges requires letting go of control and letting others help you think outside the box. Technology is your weapon, but how you wield it determines success or failure. Perfection is the enemy of progress, but great work is always worth the extra time. Content matters...context matters even more. Force does not equal friction (and friction is the enemy). There’s no such thing as a stealth applicant. Omni-channel is the biggest scam of the century. Strategy before tactics. You can’t know what to do if you don’t know where you are. Begin with the end in mind.

What We Do
Incredibly Well

At the highest level, DD empowers people in the education and nonprofit world to break through barriers and make smarter decisions. But if you want to get a real taste for how we do this, we’ve established our family superpowers neatly into the following initiatives…

Education Marketing

Nonprofit Marketing

Media Production

Tony Fraga

President & CEO

Jamie Gleason

EVP of Client Success

Teresa Kehl

VP of Operations

Shane Kehl

VP of Marketing

Our Principals
Have the right principles

DD's Executive Leadership Team is powered by a unique blend of creative strategery, entrepreneurship, tech-savviness, a little gray hair, and a dash of rebellion. We’ve all been Davids and we’ve slayed many Goliaths together.

Our Core Values

Treat People Like Family

We believe that the roots of great success are great relationships, which is why with DD you get real partners, not a sales pitch. Your challenges are our challenges, and we understand that reality happens and you need partners who treat you like you’re a real human and part of our team.

Be Ridiculously Helpful

We are interested in helping you solve your biggest problems...whether that means teaching you how to do it yourself, or partnering with us to help you get it done together. Either way, “being ridiculously helpful” means you’ll be glad you came to DD for answers, ideas, technology, or services.

Challenge Conventional Thinking

Having served nonprofit and education clients for more than 3 decades, we know how important it is to challenge common conventions and think outside the box in order to stay ahead of the curve. Innovation requires challenging some best practices.

Treasure Transparency

We strive to create transparent conversations in everything we do, and we pride ourselves in being honest and realistic in our strategic recommendations, including what we believe are the right moves for a person or organization. If we don’t believe in it ourselves, we won’t recommend it for you either.

Adapt & Improve

Everyone who engages with our family of brands knows that we thrive on making smart and fast improvements that are informed by data. This is our commitment to prioritizing value over vanity when it comes to our products, services, resources, technologies, and communities.

Make It Fridge-Worthy

Excellence is what we strive for in everything that we create, and we know how to help you do that too. Our goal is to proliferate well-thought-out strategies that produce exceptional content and remarkable results — just like the one-of-a-kind art projects your mom would tape to the fridge because she’s so proud of your work!

We Help Davids Beat Goliaths

You can't pick your faculty, but you can pick your marketing team. We're giant-slaying, creative technologists that help schools maximize efficiency and effectiveness through the execution of inbound enrollment marketing campaigns. We work with marketing and enrollment management teams across a variety of contexts — from niche graduate programs to large undergraduate institutions to K-12 independent schools. Let's build something unique, together.

Empowering the
Modern Enrollment Marketer.

Enrollify produces content in a wide variety of formats — articles, videos, podcasts, newsletters, eCourses, etc. — all designed to help enrollment marketers optimize the resources they do have to generate the results that they need. We're on a mission to build a community of admissions and marketing professionals committed to creating value, reducing friction, and increasing sustainability in a student's journey to enrollment.

We help
Davids beat Goliaths

Our Story

What We Believe