About Marcia Stepanek

Marcia Stepanek designed and teaches the core communications strategy, media, and marketing courses in Columbia University's graduate Nonprofit Management Program. She is the Founder and CEO of Brand Stories, a media, marketing, and strategic communications consultancy that helps mission-focused organizations convey and scale their social impact. An award-winning journalist, executive producer, and digital/visual media producer, Marcia also is the author of the forthcoming book, Swarms: The Rise of the Digital Anti-Establishment—about the evolving power of hyper-connectivity and social networks to pervasively reshape the nonprofit sector. A former John S. Knight Fellow in New Media at Stanford University, she has worked at the intersection of digital media, technology, and social change for more than 20 years and has held executive leadership positions at major corporations in the media and publishing industries, leading editorial teams for top media organizations including Hearst, BusinessWeek, Knight-Ridder, and Ziff-Davis Media. Prior to her work at Columbia, Marcia taught and developed courses in digital media strategy; network leadership; storytelling for social impact; nonprofit marketing; data measurement, evaluation, and revision; and social media at New York University and was a senior advisor to New York University’s Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising. Earlier in her career, Marcia served as an investigative reporter and editor for a variety of national publications, and from 2005-2010, she was Founding Editor-in-Chief of Contribute, the first magazine to exclusively cover the rise of philanthropy innovation, online fundraising, and digital activism.

Marcia publishes, speaks, and leads workshops internationally on the evolution of digital networks and crowds, immersive media platforms, social networks and data-driven innovations in philanthropy. Her thought leadership and writing have appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, WIRED, MSNBC, National Public Radio, Newsday, and the Stanford Social Innovation Review, among others. She has received a variety of awards for her communications work, including a George Polk Award and a National Press Club Award for Washington Correspondence, and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and a World Technology Network Award for media and journalism. Marcia holds a Master’s degree in Communications from the University of Illinois.