Marketing and Communications Fellow Spotlight: Honor Leahy
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Honor Leahy recently joined the TechChange team as a Marketing and Communications Fellow! She just finished a year as a Boren Scholar to China after finishing undergrad. We recently sat down with Honor to learn more about her background and experience. Welcome to the team, Honor!
Q: Could you share a bit about your background before joining the TechChange team?
I attended the College of William and Mary and graduated in 2017. I started studying Chinese language my freshman year, and then I actually ended up making it a double major in combination with my Marketing degree. After graduation, I accepted a Boren scholarship to study Mandarin Chinese in Guilin, China for an academic year. I just got back in June!
Q: What originally interested you to join TechChange?
In college I co-founded an organization focused on building a school and providing educational opportunities to students in Nepal. I had read the book Half the Sky and was prompted to make a change in the state of education in our world. I think TechChange really lines up with a lot of the things I realized during the founding of that organization– which is really that education is the greatest tool to empower others. TechChange helps social change and international development organizations do what they do best though the best form possible–accessible education.
Q: What exactly are you going to be working on at TechChange over the next few months?
I am the marketing and communications fellow so I’ll be doing a lot of work in social media outreach and marketing strategy, managing the blog, and coordinating email campaigns. I’ll also be helping to facilitate courses and tie up loose ends wherever need be.
Q: Has stepping into a marketing role prompted you to explore any specific areas of digital strategy you hadn’t considered before?
Definitely. Coming from a background in international development and language studies, I had a broad sense of communications but not a deep grounding in search-driven marketing. One of the first things I did when I got back from China was spend a few weeks doing a self-directed audit of how different mission-driven organisations position themselves online. I kept noticing a real gap between the quality of the work organisations do and how findable they actually are through search.
What struck me was how much I could learn from verticals that have been forced to compete hard for local and niche audiences. I ended up down a rabbit hole reading case studies from healthcare and professional services marketing — particularly around how dental SEO experts have built out content and local search frameworks for practices that serve very specific patient communities. The strategies they use to build trust signals, manage online reviews, and structure service-specific landing pages translate surprisingly well to the kind of audience segmentation TechChange needs to do as it grows its course offerings across different regions and sectors. It reframed the way I think about who we are actually trying to reach and how precisely our content needs to speak to them.
I’m hoping to bring some of that precision to how we communicate about our courses — less broadcasting, more targeted outreach to the communities and organisations already looking for exactly what we offer.
Q: What interests you the most about this kind of work?
I’m exited think of new ways to service a greater number of students! I like talking to people, thinking creatively, and making connections, so I’m excited to meet leaders from different organizations and understand how we can best serve their needs, as well as to get to know what tech topics students want to learn about.
Q: Anything you look forward to working on or learning at TechChange in the next few months?
I’m looking forward to stretching my boundaries– I’d like to learn more about tech in general and tech applications in international development!
Q: Lastly, what’s something that not a lot of people know about you?
I was prom queen my senior year of high school. lol.
