Meet Amy Jacobus

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Amy Jacobus a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Amy, so glad you were able to set aside some time for us today. We’ve always admired not just your journey and success, but also the seemingly high levels of self-discipline that you seem to have mastered and so maybe we can start by chatting about how you developed it or where it comes from?

I studied dance from age 3 through 23, and that training gave me a very specific relationship with discipline that I carry into everything I do. When you’re committed to attending multiple classes a week, plus rehearsals, plus putting in your own personal practice time, you develop a pretty intense relationship to time and progress. You become adept at sorting priorities, you take greater responsibility for your efforts, and you begin to understand how routine and repetition mean more than sporadic bursts of effort.

In dance, you’re constantly adjusting—your alignment, your timing, your spacing, your movement ideas. And if you can frame these adjustments as problem-solving vs. “corrections” or self-criticism, you can tap into a very productive self-discipline, rather than a punitive or emotionally damaging version.

It’s not easy. Dancers are known for being hard on themselves—on their bodies and their minds. I certainly was.

But if you keep trying to find the value in small, incremental movement forward, it opens up a whole new way of thinking in your life as a whole. This incremental progress translates directly to how I approach marketing strategy with our clients at Grounded Growth Marketing. We’re constantly testing, adjusting, and refining, but not from a place of “you’re doing it wrong.” It’s always “let’s see what happens when we shift this element; let’s see how we can improve.”

Dance also taught me that discipline without purpose is just suffering. Every plié, every twist of the torso, every gesture should serve the larger goal of being able to tell a story through movement. Similarly, every marketing tactic we recommend should serve a larger strategic purpose. If it doesn’t, we let it go.

The self-discipline I learned in the dance studio—showing up consistently, focusing on fundamentals (even when I didn’t want to), making small adjustments rather than scrapping everything to start over—is exactly what it takes to create the sustainable marketing systems we build so our clients don’t burn out.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

I’m the founder and lead strategist at Grounded Growth Marketing, where we help mission-driven nonprofits and creative entrepreneurs build marketing that actually feels good to create and to receive.

What excites me most is that we’re not just helping individual organizations with their marketing—we’re trying to shift how the entire sector thinks about promotion and visibility. Too many incredible artists and nonprofits are burning themselves out with scattered, inauthentic marketing because they think that’s what “professional” looks like or because they feel like they’re expected to latch on to the next “shiny” tactic.

Our approach is slower, more methodical, and embraces longer term vision: we start by assessing everything you’ve built till now before adding anything new. We focus on tactics that align with your natural strengths, so we can remain true to your voice, rather than trying to be everywhere at once. And we ground every strategy in your actual mission and values, so every post, every email plays a part in a broader lift of your brand and your impact at large.

What makes this work special is seeing the relief when our clients realize marketing doesn’t have to feel manipulative or exhausting. When Liz Lerman built evergreen email automations for those interested in her Critical Response Process, it turned into more than increased subscribers and higher engagement with programming—it took some continuous promotion of their plates, and it supports a larger vision of legacy.

We’ve recently launched a Resistance Marketing Toolkit for our arts clients at https://groundedgrowth.marketing/dusa-conference/. With government arts funding under systematic attack, foundation priorities shifting, revenue levels dropping across all arts disciplines, and an assault on DEIA and other values-based initiatives, we’re helping arts organizations show up with integrity and consistency to fight for their place in our culture. We want to reframe nonprofit fundraising from “please support our work” to “join the resistance against cultural defunding.” We’re thinking a lot about messaging that matches the urgency of the moment while maintaining the long-term view and ease we’re known for.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

1. Critical Thinking/Strategic Questioning
My journalism training taught me to question everything and dig deeper than surface-level answers. In marketing, this means asking “Why do you want to be on Instagram?” instead of just “What should we post on Instagram?” The breakthrough moments with clients always come from questions they haven’t asked themselves yet.

My advice: Practice asking “why” and “what if” constantly. When you see a successful campaign, don’t just admire it—reverse engineer it. Why did they choose that message? What assumptions are they making about their audience? What would happen if they did the opposite?

2. Systems Thinking
Dancing and being hyper aware of my body taught me that everything is connected. Marketing works the same way. Your email subject line affects open rates, which affects click-through rates, which affects conversions. You can’t optimize one piece without understanding the whole system.

My advice: Map out your entire customer journey from first awareness (how are they searching for what you offer?) to final decision (what’s the last step before they say yes?) Look for the connections and dependencies. When something isn’t working, trace it back through the system.

3. Saying No With Purpose
This remains the hardest lesson, and I’m re-learning it all the time. Early in my business, I said yes to everything and nearly burned out completely. Learning to say “We could do that, but we won’t, and here’s why” transformed both my work quality and my client relationships. It also taught me to ask for help when I need it, and to delegate with thoughtfulness and care to those around me who are equally as or even more skilled than I am.

My advice: Get clear on what you do best and what energizes you, then protect that fiercely. Every yes to something outside your zone of genius is a no to something inside of it. Practice the phrase “That’s not where we add the most value” even though it feels SO HARD to say out loud.

The common thread of all the above? All three require you to slow down and think before acting. This is as anti-hustle culture as you can get. As a natural born hard worker, prone to overdoing it, this is as much a reminder to me as it is to any of you. Depth always beats speed in building something sustainable.

All the wisdom you’ve shared today is sincerely appreciated. Before we go, can you tell us about the main challenge you are currently facing?

The biggest challenge I’m facing—and that the entire arts sector is grappling with—is helping organizations maintain their values and mission integrity while adapting to a dramatically shifted funding landscape.

The data is sobering: earned revenue for dance organizations alone is down 42% since reopening after the pandemic. 62% of dance companies have less than three months of working capital. And now we’re seeing systematic defunding of government arts support, while 10-20% of arts organizations rely on government grants for the majority of their revenue.

What I’m seeing is organizations panicking, which strangely, often looks like doubling down on old, pushy marketing and fundraising approaches that are not working in this climate.

Here’s how Grounded Growth is facing it: we’re helping arts organizations shore up longterm messaging and ongoing marketing systems, strengthening their website SEO to future proof their digital presence for the age of AI; we’re rebuilding email marketing lists to better segment their audience for personalized news and asks; we’re creating automations that install fundraising asks around emotional investment rather than fiscal year deadlines; and we’re encouraging social media strategy that favors engagement and discovery more than event promotion.

We’re encouraging transparency about our current crisis while maintaining dignity and authenticity in voice and mission. We’re framing artistic work as essential cultural infrastructure, not nice-to-have programming.

We’re also hosting peer group conversations to learn from trusted advisors and consultants in the nonprofit sector, because our help alone can’t solve these problems.

The obstacles are real and urgent. But I’ve learned that when you’re facing something this big, you can’t just push harder at the tactics. You have to zoom back out and focus on the whole approach.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://groundedgrowth.marketing
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/groundedgrowth.marketing
• Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/amynjacobus

Image Credits

Studio 5800