Vanessa Townsend, Project Manager

Vanessa brings a unique background to Professional Services Marketing, Inc., having graduated from the University of Minnesota Law School and having been admitted to the Minnesota Bar. While attending law school, Vanessa worked as a summer associate for Foley & Mansfield and interned for the Honorable Judge Connolly of the Minnesota Court of Appeals.

Before attending law school, Vanessa worked as a project manager for Professional Services Marketing serving a variety of legal, financial, and healthcare clients. She looks forward to putting her combination of legal and marketing skills to use in serving Professional Services Marketing clients.

Vanessa’s marketing experience includes project management for an accounting firm and a corporate citizenship consulting start-up client. As a project manager, she managed marketing initiatives and developed relationships with clients, ensuring marketing strategy implementation met timeline and budget requirements. She has also independently worked as a full-time marketing assistant for an accounting firm client of Professional Services Marketing, as the website manager for a web-based resource for families in crisis, and in the market research department of a large Minnesota healthcare organization.

Vanessa has worked with PSM clients on numerous projects, assisting them through all phases of marketing plan development and implementation:

• Client communications and newsletters
• Client survey and interview projects
• Copywriting and editing
• Marketing plan development
• Market research and analysis
• Project management
• Proposal development
• Public and media relations
• Sales support
• Seminars and special event planning
• Timeline and budget management
• Website planning and content development

Vanessa is a 2009 magna cum laude graduate of the University of Minnesota Law School. Vanessa served as a managing editor and staff member of Law and Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice. While a staff member, the Journal selected Vanessa’s article “Discrimination Lurking on the Books: Examining the Constitutionality of the Minneapolis Lurking Ordinance,” for publication in its Summer 2008 volume. Upon graduation, Vanessa received a Public Interest Award for completing over 50 hours of legal volunteer work while in law school, including volunteering at Project Homeless Connect, rural divorce clinics, and participating in the Asylum Law Project.

Vanessa is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and a 2005 summa cum laude graduate of Saint Olaf College in Northfield, MN, where she earned a double major in English and Women's Studies. While at Saint Olaf, Vanessa was a Regents Scholar and spent Fall 2003 studying abroad at Oxford University in England.