Alyson Curtis [M.S.]

Alyson Curtis is a communicator, teacher, connector and doer. She works with organizations striving to inspire action and drive social change. A natural storyteller and trained communicator, Alyson advises organizations primarily in the health and wellness space on how to target and influence audiences. She teaches and empowers her clients to take active roles in sustaining the best-practices she introduces. A true Malcolm Gladwell “connector,” Alyson is always in the habit of making introductions and finding valuable connection points across networks to build relationships beyond the “usual suspects.” And lastly, Alyson is a practical doer, open to collaboration, sensitive to budget and focused on measurable outcomes and impact.

Most recently as full-time faculty at Georgetown University, Alyson taught and mentored hundreds of graduate students and leveraged her vast network of Washington insiders to share their thought-leadership and experiences with students. Alyson taught the communication program’s foundational curriculum which was seminal to the launch of a successful online degree offering. She led symposium-style lectures and hired and supervised professional advisors to lead small group working sessions with graduate students providing pro bono communications counsel to clients from around the world.

Prior to her appointment at Georgetown, Alyson was a Director of Integrated Communications at AARP where she led communications efforts for the Association’s national and international priorities. The subject matter in her portfolio was vast and Alyson’s role was to direct an enterprise-wide team of communicators from AARP’s publications and broadcast programs, social media, media relations, public affairs, speechwriters and internal communications. Her people skills were put to good use in this role that was responsible for promoting initiatives like a national brand revitalization, a thought-leader positioning strategy for Board members and C-level executives and the launch of a program focused on engaging older adult tutors to improve K-3 student literacy in disadvantaged schools, to name a few. 

A public health professional by degree, Alyson has worked in the communications field throughout her career. She launched and pioneered the marketing approach for several health channels at RevolutionHealth.com, the 2008 start-up funded by Steve Case and aimed to rival WebMD. Alyson cut her teeth in the digital/online communications space at Revolution Health with an incredible talent pool of technology visionaries and entrepreneurs; she felt fortunate to be on the leading-edge of early concepts around personal health management and the power of user-generated content that now drives so much of our current day communications tactics.

At Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, she was tapped to manage several innovative partnerships for health clients at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). She’s most proud of the partnership she cultivated between Volunteer Match and local health agencies nationwide to build a corps of volunteers to help Medicare beneficiaries navigate their program benefits.  Her work to adapt educational materials about the HPV vaccine for multicultural audiences also stands out to her as some of her most meaningful agency work.

Early in her career, Alyson led communications research initiatives for CMS at the consulting agency, Bearing Point, to better understand how employers could be Medicare information intermediaries for family caregiver and pre-retirees. She built relationships with hospital executives at the best practices research firm, The Advisory Board Company and supported education campaigns at the professional association, American Public Health Association. Alyson has considerable experience building effective national and local education and outreach campaigns from concept to completion.

Alyson holds a BA in Public Health from The George Washington University and a MS in Health Policy and Management from the Harvard School of Public Health. After twenty years in Washington, DC she relocated with her husband and two children to Durham, NC in 2017.  She has been leading Curtis Consulting ever since.