Freelance Event & Field Marketing Manager

Kaizen is a company dedicated to improving government technology and services. They are seeking a Freelance Event & Field Marketing Manager to build and manage their events strategy, focusing on federal conferences and engagements that enhance relationships with public sector buyers.

Responsibilities:

• Own Kaizen's events strategy end-to-end. Build and run the annual calendar, anchored to the federal buying year: fiscal year-end, agency budget windows, and the conferences where our buyers actually show up
• Decide where Kaizen shows up and where it doesn't. Evaluate conferences and sponsorships, negotiate levels and booth placement with organizers, and be willing to walk away. A defensible no matters as much as a good yes
• Own our physical presence. Booth design, demo staging, collateral, and swag that match the caliber of the product, along with the vendors and production partners who build them
• Run the field motion alongside sales. Account targeting, pre-event outreach, on-site meeting scheduling, team travel and staffing, and the follow-up that determines whether the show produced anything
• Own the satellite program around major shows. Executive dinners, agency roundtables, and closed-door briefings, most of them in Washington, where the highest-value conversations often happen off the show floor
• Land Kaizen leadership on stage and in the content. Speaker placement, panel submissions, and awards in partnership with Brand & Storytelling and Government Affairs, with photo, video, and customer story capture planned into the run-of-show
• Scope and build Kaizen-hosted events. Define what we should own, whether a summit, a dinner series, or a recurring briefing, and determine whether we host it outright or co-host with a govtech company, consulting firm, or systems integrator
• Own the budget and the reporting. Manage spend and tradeoffs across the program, and build reporting with BizOps that ties events to pipeline, qualified meetings, and cost per meeting
• Navigate federal ethics rules. Gift and hospitality limits vary by agency and shift again at the state and local level. Work with Legal to design programs that are both generous and compliant

Requirements:

• 5-15 years in events, experiential marketing, or field marketing, with direct ownership of strategy and budget rather than execution alone
• Demonstrated experience owning a conference circuit: which shows to commit to, what a sponsorship is worth, how a booth gets built, and how the week runs
• Experience running events for federal or public sector buyers is a significant advantage, as are relationships with the Washington venues, producers, and association organizers who make things happen
• A track record of building an events program up from part-time or fractional coverage
• Experience partnering with sales on targeting and follow-up, and comfort being measured against pipeline
• Experience producing owned events such as dinners, roundtables, and summits alongside conference work
• Excellent written and verbal communication; comfortable drafting invitations, event briefs, run-of-show documents, and executive prep for senior audiences
• Sound judgment under time pressure and public visibility
• You've built an events program rather than inherited one, owning the strategy, the budget, the vendor bench, and the measurement
• You know the federal conference landscape, or you'll learn it quickly, and you can tell a show that draws program offices and CIOs from one that only draws vendors
• You have strong taste and can defend it. You've walked a venue and known it was wrong, and you've ended a sponsorship everyone assumed would renew
• You think in pipeline rather than attendance, and you've defended an events budget with something more rigorous than photos and a headcount
• You're comfortable in the operational detail: shipping, badge scans, AV failures, staffing, and the seating chart that determines whether a dinner works
• You're credible with senior government audiences, from a two-star Army general to an agency CIO to a contracting officer
• You manage vendors, agencies, and production partners by directing their output rather than depending on it
• You thrive with high autonomy in ambiguous, fast-moving environments, and you self-generate the agenda rather than waiting for one
• You're AI-pilled and default to these tools in your daily workflows
• You're emotionally intelligent, thoughtful, and empathetic toward public sector missions