Convert Innovations, incorporated in early 2008, achieves exceptional results for clients, from Fortune 500 companies to fledgling start-ups.

Stefanie Sigurdson, MBA, President Stefanie@ConvertInc.com

Stefanie Sigurdson is a business person first and foremost.  She is therefore focused on achieving the strategic goals of each individual business with which she works and keeps working until the goals are achieved.

After nearly eight years of managing websites and marketing budgets for up to millions of dollars for large multinationals such as 3M, CareerBuilder and Microsoft, Stefanie became tired with the lack of focus on business problems. Instead, her designers were focusing on how marketing materials looked and website developers were thinking of integrating the latest technical innovations – whether they were good for the business or not.  She, on the other hand, believes that marketing strategy should be about getting the results companies seek to achieve. She saw a big opportunity to become the solution that she wished she had.

With this in mind, Stefanie created Convert Marketing to provide outsourced marketing services that use creative strategies while focusing on the business problem they are meant to resolve, all with a solid backing of research and analytics.  Some of her clients include Microsoft Canada, Intercontinental Hotel, Securit/ Shred-It, as well as a wide variety of small businesses and start-ups in a variety of industries, including healthcare, retail, professional services and condo developments.

Stefanie graduated with an honours undergraduate degree in business from Carleton University and an MBA from Queen’s and is the Director of Communications for Queen’s Alumni Toronto.   She gives a significant percentage of her revenues to charitable causes including: The Stephen Lewis Foundation, Habitat for Humanity and the UN High Commission for Refugees. She is also asked to do speaking engagements about Marketing and Entrepreneurship.

Matthew Malowany, Creative Director
Matthew@convertinc.com

Matthew Malowany has creativity in his blood. With a writer mother and a musician father, he was born into a family of art, music and literature. From an early age he possessed that mysterious compulsion creative people have to express themselves, a compulsion that continues to this day.

Matthew Malowany

Professionally, Matthew has a background in journalism, having studied at Ryerson University and pursued a career at CBC Radio spanning seventeen years. During that time, he developed a fondness for sabbaticals in order to explore outside interests, chief among them being travel and volunteering abroad. He has spent six months in West Africa, two weeks in New Orleans (working with Habitat for Humanity after Hurricane Katrina) and five years in China.  In the course of those travels he amassed a grand storehouse of experience, documented in photos and writing.

Eventually leaving the CBC, he joined Convert Innovations to put his creative energies to work. It was an instant match, as before long he was fully engaged in social media campaigns. Writing blogs, creating newsletters, taking photos, producing videos — these and many other forms of expression are instrumental in furthering a modern branding and awareness effort.

This truly is the information age, and Matthew is passionate in the belief that it takes much more than software coders and graphic designers to reach the teeming millions who spend time online. It takes intelligence to make full use of the ever-changing technologies, it takes an understanding of online communities and how they interact, and it takes one thing that has never gone away through the endless seesawing of technological change: creative expression, with heart, drawing on a life lived and an ability to connect with other human beings.

Some say the creative impulse has suffered in the information age. Matthew feels just the opposite: technology has opened up whole new ways of reaching people. And we’re only in the first stages of this new environment! It’s an exciting time to be alive.

[For a sampling of some of our web videos, click here.]