Kimberly Johnson, Director

Kimberly Johnson plans, manages and leads local, national and international capacity building trainings for a wide variety of foundations and nonprofit organizations. She is a trainer and coach, and has worked with hundreds of grantees from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Surdna Foundation and many others, helping to provide them with the knowledge and tools they need to successfully communicate to their audiences and achieve their goals.

In addition to conducting in-person trainings, Kim develops and leads a variety of webinars for Spitfire clients, allowing hundreds of people from across the country to participate in many of Spitfire’s most popular trainings without ever having to leave their offices. Kim provides one-on-one technical assistance to clients across a variety of issue areas, helping them to create communication plans, message platforms, elevator speeches, one-pagers, PowerPoint presentations, website copy and more. Kim played a central role in the research and development of Spitfire’s most recent publication, From Big Ideas to Big Change, a communication guide to help grantmakers communicate their change strategy more effectively.

Kim produces the Hewlett Foundation’s Communications Academy, an annual training designed to help their grantees learn how to design and evaluate a comprehensive communications strategy and gain sharper personal and strategic communications skills. Over the past year she produced several program officer trainings that help foundation staff understand how to incorporate strategic communications into their funding strategies, improve their personal communications skills, and evaluate and guide grantee communication efforts to increase impact.

Prior to joining Spitfire Strategies, Kim worked as a communications specialist at SEIU United Healthcare Workers – West in Oakland, CA. At UHW, Kim developed public relations campaign strategies and tactics to support the union’s organizing, contract bargaining, social justice and legislative goals.Kim previously worked as a marketing assistant at the Small Business Exchange in San Francisco, a weekly newspaper dedicated to providing business opportunities to small, minority- and women-owned businesses across California and the U.S.

Kim received her B.A. in communications from The University of Arizona and is a rare breed – a San Francisco native actually living in San Francisco.