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. Our marketing coaching starts with front-end “listening” and observation to customize and target your message, materials and ways to reach your audiences with impact and cost-effective quality.

Johnson Consulting delivers marketing communications that increase sales and visibility, fundraising communications that strengthen relationships and organizational communications design that builds staff and volunteer skills as advocates and ambassadors. We’ve been on both sides of the table — as clients and as consultants — so we’ve been in your shoes. You’ll find us very collaborative –and we believe it’s more fun and productive that way.

Janis Johnson, Principal

Janis Johnson formed Johnson Consulting in 2005 after more than 25 years as an award-winning journalist with major news media, a senior communications executive and writer and a content strategist in print and online. Her company, based in San Rafael, California, just north of San Francisco, uses successful strategies and tools from for-profit businesses and nonprofit organizations to develop marketing communications customized to each client.

Before starting her consulting business, 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.

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.