AOAP Marketing and Member Engagement Director

Meet the Association of Aquatic Professionals Social Media, Marketing and Membership Engagement Director.

Melissa Fadler is excited to join the Association of Aquatic Professionals part-time as the Marketing and Member Engagement Director. With a combined wealth of experience in collegiate, non-profit, and community aquatics, Melissa also brings nearly a decade of marketing and promotional experience to the association. Originally from Missouri, she got her start teaching Lifeguarding and CPR classes with the American Red Cross of Greater Kansas City, and had a first career in aquatics with the Jewish Community Center of St. Louis and later with Washington State University. She has a Bachelor of Science degree in Exercise Science from Truman State University, and a Master of Science in Recreation and Park Management from Purdue. Melissa is currently a dissertation away from her Ed.D. in Higher Education Leadership at Sam Houston State University, where she works full-time as the Associate Director of Marketing for the Department of Recreational Sports. In her spare time, she enjoys refereeing volleyball, officiating at the high school, club, and collegiate levels.

Melissa wants to be strategic in our focus for the association. We need to know who our constituents and members are.  What areas in aquatics do they work?  Are they mainly operators or programmers? Are there segments we are not targeting or supporting? The needs of those different populations will need different messaging and different resources. We need to dial in on the data and where our engagement is currently, and do an analysis on what it shows. Then we can begin to tailor not only our marketing, but our overall conference planning. A secondary focus would be to engage our aquatics directors directly and involve their staffs.  These supervisors have potentially had limited conversations with their lifeguards or students about how to make a career out of aquatics. A campaign to engage them is definitely in the cards. Melissa looks forward to enhancing the brand strategies of the Association, and making it a necessity for any aquatics professional to belong.