Julie Colehour

Julie Colehour is an owner of C+C, a 100-person social marketing firm with the purpose of creating campaigns that help take care of people and the planet (www.cplusc.com). She is also a founding board member of the Pacific Northwest Social Marketing Association (PNSMA) serving as the board’s Vice President from 2014-2021. In 2011, she led a team of volunteers that created the annual PNSMA SPARKS conference which attracts hundreds of social marketers each year to learn about social marketing innovations and best practices.

Ms. Colehour has led teams to create social marketing campaigns that address COVID-19, climate, waste prevention, healthcare, STDs, substance use disorders, water conservation, wildfires, distracted driving, litter, suicide and recycling. Most recently, she has been helping the Washington State Department of Health (WA DOH) with their COVID-19 response which has included a rapid-turn approach to increase adoption of COVID preventative behaviors and vaccine adoption. This work contributed to Washington state being the fourth lowest in the nation for COVID-19 deaths per 100K people. She has also helped support the EPA’s ENERGY STAR® program for the past twenty-five years including co-leading the original national launch plan that led to a 41 percent national awareness of the ENERGY STAR® label in just three years.

Ms. Colehour is frequently called upon to speak on social marketing at venues across the country and has helped hundreds of organizations with planning and implementing social marketing campaigns. She has conducted social marketing trainings sessions for many organizations including EPA, NOAA, Waste Management, Puget Sound Energy, the U.S. Department of Energy and the Consortium for Energy Efficiency, WaterSense and WA DOH.

Ms. Colehour is co-author of The Environmental Marketing Imperative (Probus Publishing) and for the social marketing chapter in the upcoming Be the Change textbook (Oxford Publishing). She led the charge in 2014 on two energy-efficient lighting social marketing pilot programs for ENERGY STAR for which the results were presented at the BECC conference and published in the Social Marketing Quarterly Journal. Ms. Colehour has received professional recognition for her work including being named the Puget Sound Chapter of PRSA 2021 PR Professional of the Year, the 2017 Person of the Year at the NW Marketing Awards, one of PRovoke's 2019 Top 25 Innovators and the one of The Puget Sound Business Journal’s 40 under 40 young outstanding executives in 2001. Ms. Colehour’s work has also been recognized with many awards (Silver Anvils, SABRES, PRWeek Awards, Addys, Emmys) including being recognized in 2021 for the COVID-19 work for the WA DOH by winning the Best of Silver Anvils award from PRSA and a Global SABRE award. In 2022, C+C was named the SMANA Outstanding Agency for its commitment to the elimination of social disparities at the USF Social Marketing Conference. This award recognized Ms. Colehour and her team’s work on the Vacúnate Mijo/Mija campaign for WA DOH that helped increase COVID-19 vaccination rates among the Hispanic/Latino community.