Kevin Doherty is a storyteller and content marketing leader who has spent his career explaining complicated things to the people who need to understand them. His recent work has been with SaaS and AI platforms in complex industries, many of them serving several markets at once: clinicians and patients, employers and employees, operators and the investors behind them. Healthcare is his deepest specialty, with learning and development a close second.
Kevin grew up in Fairfield, California, the son of two public school music teachers, in a family that counts teachers in more than one generation. His childhood was given over to library books, dance classes, community theater, and a steady plan to become a writer.
UCLA admitted him to its acting program. He later re-auditioned his way into the Ray Bolger Musical Theater Program and talked his way into a French minor that theater students were not ordinarily permitted.
Kevin’s acting credits include Modern Family, New Girl, and a run as Olaf in Disneyland’s stage production of Frozen. He also appeared in more than 30 commercials, including a Super Bowl spot for Taco Bell and national campaigns for Nike, Microsoft, Amazon, and AT&T.
Those sets were where he learned the trade. Kevin watched how major brands and their agencies built a campaign, and he began contributing to the work in front of him. Improvised buttons came first, followed by hooks of his own and then a hand in writing the spots themselves.
Brand and creative strategy work came next, for more than 50 clients. One of them was Banza, for which he wrote the brand’s first billboard campaign. The work became a storytelling practice he has kept, and been paid for, ever since.
Kevin’s first full-time marketing role was at ICAgile, where professional learning became his subject matter. He earned a certification in Agile team facilitation there. One of his early decisions was to lower the price of a struggling workshop, which promptly sold out twice and grew 885 percent more profitable.
Kevin then led marketing communications at Vyond, writing for the HR and learning professionals who used its video software. He built the company’s first marketing communications team, ran email for more than a million subscribers, and hosted a monthly webinar series that regularly drew around a thousand attendees. One campaign produced 616 qualified leads in six weeks, and another closed 369 percent above its revenue goal. His team won 10 Telly Awards in 2021 for stories told with the product.
Vyond also returned him to the stage. Kevin spoke at learning and development conferences about video, a subject he knew from in front of the camera and behind it, and appeared twice in Gartner webinars.
Kevin joined Alma in 2022 to build its content marketing function from nothing. The company served therapists, their clients, and the insurers who pay them, and its content had to speak to each in turn. He hired and led a team of seven across writing, social, and video. The program improved every content KPI sixfold in its first year and grew new organic visitors by 246 percent.
The work also found readers no one had planned for. One article from the program, written in a single day, was later cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and in several academic papers. Kevin’s work has been featured by Forbes, Gartner, Sales Hacker, and the Content Marketing Institute.
Kevin went on to lead content at Upheal, an AI platform for therapists, and then at August Health, which serves senior living. Both roles put AI to work in the content process, and output at Upheal reached 50 articles a week at its peak. His results there included a 104 percent rise in content-driven traffic in his first 90 days, a fourfold increase in citations by AI search tools, and a 13-to-1 ratio of customer lifetime value to acquisition cost. August Health saw its content output quadruple in his first month, and a sales deck he wrote helped secure a preferred partnership with one of the largest real estate investment trusts in senior living.
Kevin’s management style is affirming, trusting, and instructive. Years of mentorship in Agile ways of working taught him to plan in short cycles, review the results candidly, and adjust. His teams have tended to learn quickly, and at Alma, colleagues outside his team asked him to mentor them as well. He counts their growth among his proudest results.
Kevin has recently moved back to Fairfield with his family and two dogs. He is a husband, an adoptive father, a mentor with Big Brothers Big Sisters, and a Beyoncé fan of long standing and few reservations.
Kevin is returning from a brief sabbatical and looking to join a caring team working on a complex problem, preferably one with a story that needs telling.