2025 was a challenging year. Professionally and personally, it was a roller coaster that began at the bottom and has wound its way up and down several times over. Looking back now, I’m happy to report that overall, it was an epic comeback year for damolade. On the personal front, well, that’s still a work in progress.

At the beginning of 2025, I thought I was about to lose everything I worked to build for nearly a decade. It’s not an exaggeration to say that my entire livelihood was being threatened.

As soon as Trump was reelected, he and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) began dismantling or eliminating every cause I was working on with clients.

Reproductive and abortion rights were at the cornerstone of my causes. I’d already lived through the “how do we survive this?” version of that work.

Back in 2022, after the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, we had barely survived at Austin Women’s Health (AWHC), where I worked for 6 years as their Fractional CMO. We fought to keep the last remaining independent clinic in Texas’s doors open to patients in the face of an 80% revenue loss. We did it by launching new services and partnering with local press. It was hard, but with the excellent clinical leadership and PR partnerships, we pushed through. The clinic remains open and focused on reproductive health services for the community.

We couldn’t even begin to foresee how bad it was about to get.

Fast forward to the first 100 days of 2025, Trump took a hacksaw at the rest of the causes I was working on, causes that support millions of Americans, as well as my own family. I posted about it on LinkedIn here back in March.

Causes like diversity, equity, and inclusion were targeted as “radical and wasteful,” and gun violence was demoted as an unimportant concern for public health.

We had just spent about six months optimizing our client, The Center for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, a DEI consultancy based in Portland, Oregon, for top-level DEI keywords. We built topic clusters around high-intent search terms designed to drive traffic to their trainings and workshops. Then, in January 2025, Trump’s attack on DEI began.

By February, we were stripping all “DEI” language from the website. As we rushed to re-optimize around terms like “organizational culture strategy,” we lost more than half of the traffic we had worked so hard to build, both locally and nationally. Throughout the rest of the year, we struggled to get anywhere near our previous traffic and conversion levels, mainly because the administration made institutions afraid to do business with what had suddenly become a taboo category of workplace training. DEI was now a bad word.

Furthermore, they have completely dissolved any DEI training or budgeting within the Department of Education, and Project 2025 plans to erase the U.S. Department of Education from the government entirely.

The list goes on.

Our other long-term client, the Ad Council, was launching its gun safety campaign, Agreetoagree.org, for which we worked on the SEO strategy for months. In March 2025, the Trump administration removed the advisory from whitehouse.gov defining gun violence as a public health issue. See: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/17/trump-removes-gun-violence-public-health-advisory

To add insult to injury, after the overturning of Roe vs Wade, effectively making life-saving abortion care illegal, he began doing further damage to the health and safety of people seeking information and education. Biden’s ReproductiveRights.gov was launched to provide reproductive resources for those seeking information on subjects such as abortion. It was simply deleted by the Trump administration hours after taking office.

https://www.scrippsnews.com/politics/abortion/trump-administration-deletes-bidens-reproductive-rights-website-hours-after-taking-office

So how the hell do you come back from having your entire marketing budget nearly eliminated overnight, leaving you with barely any room for growth? And every client you work with isn’t sure whether they will survive the year?

What we did: we got bolder, and louder, and worked harder. Trust me, I’m not a believer in hustle culture, but let me tell you, I hustled hard. I’m not the kind of gal who backs down, so it was either fight or give up on my clients who were depending on me and on the clients I had yet to reach.

I relaunched damolade in April to focus entirely on mission-driven marketing, without shying away from the causes I care about and want to work on. You can see our company Values here. You may see your organization in them.

We published a tightened messaging and positioning statement and capabilities deck focused on nonprofits, social impact businesses, and values-aligned agencies to work as extensions of their team.

We launched a no-b.s email newsletter that is focused on identifying common problems we’ve found in nonprofit and mission-driven work, from donor engagement to volunteer recruitment, and strategy work on a shoestring, and aim to solve those problems in a non-spammy monthly email sequence. If you’re interested, you can see preview posts to get a flavor of what you’ll receive from me, and subscribe here.

In Spring 2025, I felt hopeful again. I was making new connections on LinkedIn, engaging with readers through my newsletter, and thanks to another great-fit referral from my colleague and friend, Kristy Lafollette, I began working with a fantastic community center in Portland, Oregon, called Rosewood Initiative. Their programs support economic stability, upward mobility, health, wellness, and community resilience across East Portland. We developed a much-needed KPI-focused content strategy, refreshed their website’s UX, organized it around their audience’s needs, optimized their site for Local SEO, and partnered with Shawn Livengood to set them up with a Google Grant to drive local awareness.

Sidenote: damolade subsidize’s our small nonprofit client work with revenue from partnerships with larger agencies and businesses. So if you’re looking for an easy way to support our work, one option is simply working with me!

Here’s what Roeswood’s Communications Manager said about working with us:

Then, in the Summer of 2025, I saw a social media post that changed everything.

A national abortion provider, carafem, was seeking a contract digital strategist for a year-long contract. I read through the job description, and I immediately felt a sense of resolve. This was MY job. The job description, skills, and deliverables all completely matched my expertise to a T.

While I thought it was a long shot, I cold-applied for the gig without any connection to the company. I began a dialogue with them about my experience in women’s healthcare, specifically abortion, and how we saved Austin Women’s Health Center after Roe. I was thrilled to learn that I would be considered for an interview. I was even more hopeful after meeting the team at Dilate, Inc, their agency of record, the Director of Strategy, and their COO, and hitting it off with all of them.

I waited patiently for an offer, which I finally got in July after about a month-long process. To say this offer has changed everything for me and (damolade) would be an understatement. I am beyond thrilled to be working on expanding abortion access in a national capacity.

So after some staggering losses and a significant win, I also want to shout out a couple of highlight accomplishments that these organizations, I, and a few great partners have helped deliver in 2024 and 2025, despite the constant onslaught of bans, restrictions, removals, criminalizations, etc. The list goes on.

First, carafem.

carafem expanded access to abortion care in more states, 16 states plus D.C., and extended medication abortion care to support people with pregnancies up to 12 weeks. They’ve reduced financial barriers by launching a sliding scale for fees and increasing Medicaid coverage for telehealth abortion care. In late 2024, they launched “abortion pills for future use,” getting these essential medications into more people’s hands even before someone who is pregnant and doesn’t want to be, needs them. They are actively fundraising to keep care affordable, while working towards long-term sustainability through efficiency and small, high-performing teams clinically and operationally. They were recognized with a Gold Anthem award for their advertising campaign in NYC.

In mid-2024, they lost over 70% of their organic traffic to a Google Algorithm update that targeted them for not meeting YMYL or E-E-A-T standards. I was hired, in part, to update their organic search strategy and help regain some of the traffic they lost by developing their organic marketing channels more fully and making them more AI-ready.

I’m about six months into my work with them, but so far, we have made significant progress. The first 3 months were mostly spent on strategy, so I’m only counting the last 3 months as progress toward my goals. With the help of the fantastic team at Dilate, Inc., especially. Brandon Whalen, the growth guru, and Fleetwood Matthews, the Brand sage, along with partners Searchtides and Greg Brooks.

Top-level goals that have been met or exceeded by on-page SEO optimizations

• 9% more keywords in positions 1-3 on Google
• 30% increase in CTR on key commercial intent keywords for “abortion”, “abortion pills”, “abortion clinic”, and location pages.
• 18% increase in Organic traffic
• 16% increase in organic conversions (last 30 days)

Some of the tactics and operational updates that correlate to these improvements were:

• Bringing their old, outdated content up to Google’s YMYL standards
• Building trust with Google in accordance with E.E.A.T. standards by adding bylines featuring clear medical expertise on content
• Updating key brand pages to be clear and showcase differentiators
• Collecting genuine user reviews and feedback.
• Expanded our use of Schema.org to highlight credentials.
• Building or updating location page landing pages for every state where we have a physical presence, as well as states where we ship pills.
• Building authoritative backlinks in our industry in partnership with Searchtides.

And while email marketing wasn’t part of my original contract, I was happy to jump in. I loved working with the donor and partner development team to turn the old Donor page into a true donor hub, with clearer storytelling, more ways to give, and sharper differentiators. The goal was to position the organization not just as a leader in abortion care, but as an especially compelling option for DAFs, corporate donors, and individuals interested in innovation in abortion tech. With the addition of sequencing and follow-up emails, donations from email increased 148% year over year.

We are only 6 months in, but big plans for 2026 are on the horizon.

Another project I was honored to work on in 2025 was the SEO stewardship of the old Ad Council website to a new, improved experience, as well as recommendations on how to implement AI-friendly updates for the relaunch of AdCouncil.org to make it ready for the future of search.

Warning, this gets nerdy.

I completed a full SEO discovery: site audit, analytics review, and stakeholder interviews, then defined SEO-relevant KPIs. The analysis surfaced strong site entry points but also structural issues, topic silos, declining CTR despite high impressions, and at-risk areas like buried research content, unclear resource categorization, outdated case studies/blogs, and non-indexable conversion paths. These findings shaped the KPI set (rankings, organic sessions, DA, backlinks, CTR) and the risk/priority list for the redesign.

I then translated those findings into Information Architecture (IA) and wireframe recommendations to protect and grow topical authority: expose priority hubs in the mega-nav; create indexable landings for issue areas/initiatives (not just filters); standardize internal linking; add breadcrumbs and Related/Explore-Next modules; created FAQ/HowTo schema and defined a redirect/canonical plan.

The site has yet to be relaunched, but that will be coming in 2026. We’ll measure success against the KPI set and add “indexed pages by type” and “internal linking health” to confirm IA impact.

Expected outcomes post-refresh: preserved link equity and rankings during migration, higher CTR from clearer intent-matched metadata, stronger visibility (including rich/AI surfaces) for campaigns and thought leadership, and increased engagement with resources and conversion paths.

OK, done with the nerdy stuff.

2025 has been challenging, but filled with work I share with colleagues I enjoy working with every day. All in all, I am blessed to do what I love with people who understand my value and the expertise I bring to their teams, with almost 20 years of experience in search and content strategy.

I could not have done any of this without the support of my colleague Kristy LaFollette for referring me to their partners and clients, and Xochilith Franklin and Julie Smith for their recommendation letters to carafem. Kristy is a fantastic connector of humans and is currently seeking a sales position. You would be better off with her on your team in 2026!

2026 is shaping up to be even more challenging for the causes and people who need resources and care most. If you aren’t involved with your community or the causes you care about on some level, please don’t wait to jump in, because they may not be around next year if you don’t.

This might motivate you.

Here’s a brief, horrifying list of what’s on the 2026 roadmap for the original Project 2025 (linked above), as written by the Heritage Foundation.

• Further restricting access to abortion, Plan B, and birth control Pills
• Criminalizing the mailing of abortion pills
• Embedding fetal personhood into federal law (making abortion illegal at conception)
• Fully dismantling the Department of Education (which is almost completed now).
• The promotion of “traditional family values” would harm LGBTQ+ communities and borders on eugenics.

Use the People’s March toolkit to continue taking action against this administration.

Please share other resources with me on LinkedIn or in the comments section.

At the end of the day, no matter what happens at the federal level, people still need care, information, food, safety, and support right where they live. That’s where community and mutual aid organizations step in. They fill the gaps when systems fail, move faster than institutions, and meet people with dignity instead of red tape. These groups are often underfunded, overstretched, and doing the quiet work that keeps communities afloat. Supporting them, whether with time, money, skills, or simply showing up, isn’t charity. It’s how we take care of each other when the safety nets are intentionally torn apart.

Here are some organizations in Austin, Texas, that need your support. Please consider donating time or resources to them.

• https://www.austinmutualaid.org/
• https://www.lilithfund.org/
• https://www.casamarianella.org/

 

Onward,

Danielle