When Gail Lowney Alofsin arrived at Newport Yachting Center, management told her she had six months to prove that her newly created marketing position would pay off. Twenty-two years later the answer is a most-definite, yes.
Now the director of corporate sponsorships for the Newport Harbor Corp., the center’s parent organization, Alofsin oversees an office responsible for securing sponsorships associated with events at the center. She works 10-hour days but isn’t complaining. Sometimes it hardly seems like work handling responsibilities that include rubbing shoulders with executives from big-name companies backing everything from a concert to a boat show.
“I think people retire into jobs like this,” the 48-year-old Alofsin said.
Alofsin manages a staff of two as well as two or three interns. She ensures Newport Harbor Corp. delivers what management promised corporations paying big bucks to sponsor events. And she works with clients to craft marketing techniques so visitors do not miss the advertiser’s message. To do that she needs to learn about each sponsor, its products and what makes its potential customers tick.
“No one day has been the same,” Alofsin said. “I feel like I’m walking into a new job every single day.”
Alofsin unknowingly trained for the job starting at a young age. As a child she organized and presented musical and entertainment acts each Sunday for her parents. Some days she drew a larger audience when her parents’ friends visited. Alofsin produced a schedule, a program and made snacks for her audience. She recruited her younger siblings to appear as well.
Her background in marketing stretches back to her childhood. She conducted her first market-research report at the ripe old age of 8 while summering in Portsmouth with her parents. She measured traffic along the road, studying the best time to set up her stand hawking seashells for 10 cents and, for a quarter, driftwood fashioned into art. The research paid off and Alofsin brought in $8, enough to purchase a Julia Barbie doll.
She also received a crash course in marketing while wearing the Girl Scout uniform and selling cookies. As a teenager, Alofsin found a job trotting along the streets of Newport wearing a sandwich-board sign promoting local events.
“Maybe sales was in my blood,” Alofsin said.
In those days, Alofsin, the daughter of a nurse and an orthodontist, dreamed of becoming a college professor or a flight attendant traveling the world. She never did become a flight attendant but she’s taught for 11 years at the University of Rhode Island as an instructor and her blossoming speaking career has taken her across the country and back.
“In a sense I am doing what I wanted to do,” Alofsin said. “It’s come full circle.”
Alofsin said her success comes from attention to detail, becoming involved in the community and building real relationships with clients. During an interview she talks about how the attitude of an usher during a concert is just as important as the performance by the artist. In the community she sits on the boards of four local nonprofit organizations – including the Newport Public Library – and wishes she had more time to do more.
She is filled with spunk and tidbits about how life is about relationships and not the car you drive. She talks about learning more from her students in her university marketing class than they learn from her.
She calls her eighth-grade teacher – a nun – every morning to recite a Hail Mary. She does the same with a former colleague now living in Boston. She buys her staff coffee each Tuesday.
Alofsin also takes the message of the importance of relationships on the road from Texas to California and Florida.
Under the moniker AMP! – or Authentic Measurable Performance – businesses hire Alofsin to deliver speeches on marketing, leadership, teamwork and relationships.
It was a relationship that brought Alofsin to Newport in March 1988 – albeit “kicking and screaming” – from a woman who prides herself on not complaining and whose parents enforced a strict “no complaint zone.” She followed her soon-to-be husband, John, and left a hotel marketing job she loved in Westbrook, Conn.
When she interviewed for the Newport Yachting Center job she was one of 88 applicants. When the center hired her, she inherited a schedule with just one major event, the annual Great Chowder Cook-Off.
Alofsin worked to build up events of all sizes, including weddings. The once sleepy center that spent much of its time as a parking lot is now the hub of activity with major events like an annual music series, an Octoberfest, a boat show and the Tastes of Rhode Island. There are about 80 smaller, private events each year. Sponsors include Cox Communications Inc., PepsiCo Inc., Southwest Airlines and Stop & Shop.
Alofsin also integrated nonprofit organizations into the events. Charities such as the Children’s Miracle Network, the Boys and Girls Club, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and the Rhode Island Autism Project have combined raised more than $1 million through such partnerships.
“Her passion for marketing is sort of contagious and she does so well in managing her personal relationships and showing other people how to do that effectively,” said Don Troppoli, a vice president at Webster Bank who previously worked with Alofsin at Sovereign Bank. “When you can do all of those things, I think that’s when someone becomes extraordinary.” •
