Who we are

Our clients benefit from our unique portfolio of expertise that focuses your story, maps out your strategy and implements your plan in partnership with you. Developing the best communications strategy for your goals begins with front-end “listening” and observation to customize and target your messages and materials with impact, quality and cost-effective tools.

Janis Johnson and her team of communications experts have been in your shoes — as clients and as consultants. We understand your needs from the “inside out” but assist you in enhancing your presence from the “outside in.” You’ll find us very collaborative and responsive –and for that reason we also frequently build long-term relationships with our clients.

Janis Johnson, Principal

Janis Johnson formed Johnson Consulting in 2005 after more than a decade as a senior communications executive in higher education and health care and 25 years as an award-winning journalist with major news media. Her company, based in San Rafael, California, just north of San Francisco, brings a broad skill set to to the critical issues facing higher education, health care institutions and community nonprofits – strategic planning and strategic communications counsel for colleges and universities, alumni associations, foundations, health care organizations and community nonprofits. As a small business, Johnson Consulting also provides strategic marketing solutions for other small businesses.

Janis is also senior partner with The Napa Group, a management consulting firm specializing in strategy, leadership and organizational design, and a communications affiliate with Marts & Lundy fundraising consultants. Previously Janis spent 12 years in senior communications positions at Georgetown University, Georgetown University Medical Center and Loyola Marymount University. As assistant vice president, she oversaw the award-winning communications for Georgetown University’s $1 billion comprehensive fundraising campaign, then the largest and most successful in the university’s history. In that capacity, she developed and led an integrated campaign marketing program of brand development, publicity, print materials, films and electronic and Internet media. Before that, in the mid-1990s she was director of communications for Georgetown University Medical Center during a volatile period of downsizing and mergers, responsible for external and internal communications and the development of materials for health practitioners and consumers.

As assistant vice president at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles from 2001 to 2005, Janis built the institution’s first comprehensive communications office and led a multi-year award-winning branding initiative that repositioned the institution as “LMU in LA.” That refreshed identity raised the visibility of the university in the West and strengthened its positioning for a $300 million fundraising campaign.

Her recent book, The Artist’s Eye: Vernon P. Johnson’s Watercolors of 1950s Small Town America, chronicles small town America in the 1950s through the visually detailed paintings of her father — and the stories behind them — along with her own memories (see sidebar).

For the first 20 years of her career, Janis was a staff writer for The Washington Post and later a correspondent for USA Today, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Miami Herald, Miami Magazine, the Boston Globe and other publications focusing on news, politics, business, health, science, religion, travel and other lifestyle topics. She won several magazine awards for her work, including a special Fund for Investigative Journalism grant.

Janis is a member of the International Association of Business Communicators, the Public Relations Society of America and the Association of Fundraising Professionals. She also has served on the board of directors of To Celebrate Life Breast Cancer Foundation in Marin County. Janis has been the “woman traveler” behind the popular travel blog, Womantraveler: Travel on Your Own Terms since 2005 (www.womantraveler.info). She is a graduate of Duke University.

Capturing the Essence of “The Artist’s Eye”

Janis Johnson's recent venture into memoir writing and personal, corporate and nonprofit histories grows out of her interpretive abilities as a journalist, the multiple tools she developed as a marketing and fundraising communications strategist and her sensitivity as a writer and storyteller. "The Artist's Eye: Vernon P. Johnson's Watercolors of 1950s Small Town America" features a man and an era -- an accomplished watercolor artist whose paintings translated the story of one community into the larger and more far-reaching story of the 1950s across America. Read more at http://theartistseye.wordpress.com. And contact us to discuss options for translating your the legacy of your family, business or nonprofit into a book, website or interactive e-book.