Some careers follow a sequential path, while others are shaped by the courage to move beyond the traditional route. Kristy Badger’s career reflects the latter. Each transition has given her an opportunity to learn something new, embrace change, and create meaningful impact. Over more than two decades, she has worked across media, technology, entertainment, sports, and finance before entering the field of education. Today, she serves as Chief Marketing Officer at ACE Scholarships, a national nonprofit that has spent over 25 years expanding access to educational opportunities. Her career journey reflects her willingness to take new directions and turn each experience into an opportunity for growth and impact.
Kristy approaches uncharted territory with confidence and determination. Over the past 25 years, she has taken on roles and situations that required her to adapt, learn, and grow. She asks thoughtful questions, works with talented people, and listens carefully before taking action. She believes that effective leaders do not need to be the most knowledgeable people in the room. Instead, they need to be willing to learn from others and bring people together around a common goal. Through every transition, one principle has remained consistent. Strong leadership begins with clarity, purpose, and trust.
Leading with Purpose
Kristy has openly addressed moments of self-doubt throughout her career. She recalls telling herself, “I don’t know if can do this,” before realizing that her past experiences had prepared her for each new challenge. This perspective now shapes her approach to leadership. She sets a clear direction, hires capable people, removes obstacles, maintains high standards, and gives her staff both the reasoning behind decisions and the freedom to execute them. Her core belief is simple: leaders should create other leaders, not followers. She also considers adaptability an essential leadership skill.
The same balance of structure and instinct guides Kristy’s approach to brand building. She describes herself as a “Brand Builder” who combines analytical discipline with creative thinking. Data helps her understand what is happening, including who engages, what converts, where audiences lose interest, and where new opportunities exist. Curiosity helps her understand why these patterns occur. Creativity then guides the response. “I use data to understand what is happening and creativity to decide what comes next,” she says.
She trusts data because it reduces personal opinion in decision-making. However, she believes numbers alone rarely inspire people to act. Storytelling helps bridge that gap. Strong brands create an emotional connection and give people a clear reason to act. Building such a brand requires knowing when to rely on data and when to let creativity guide the next step. She views these disciplines as complementary rather than competing forces.
Success Through People
Kristy has delivered measurable business results throughout her career. These include revenue growth, stronger customer acquisition, and record sales and ticket outcomes. However, when asked which achievement means the most to her, she looks beyond financial results. “The greatest measure of my success isn’t how far I’ve advanced, but how far those I’ve mentored have grown,” she says.
She finds greater satisfaction in seeing people she has hired, mentored, or given opportunities to grow beyond their original roles. Some have gone on to become executives, build their own teams, or discover abilities they did not know they had. She has found that environments that encourage personal growth also tend to deliver strong business results.
This belief is reflected in her career. Nearly every role she has taken since early in her career has come through a referral from a former client, colleague, or team member. She connects this pattern to a central principle of her leadership approach. When people understand the objective, feel trusted, and are held accountable for results, they are more likely to deliver exceptional performance.
Advancing ACE Scholarships’ Mission
Under Kristy’s leadership, ACE Scholarships is building on its successes of awarding more than $395 million in scholarships over 26 years. She sees the Education Freedom Tax Credit, which is set to take effect in 2027, as an opportunity to bring this track record to a much larger national audience.
Her priority is to prepare the organization for this growth. This includes building national awareness and creating a clear path from awareness to understanding and action. It also involves strengthening the organization’s ability to attract and retain donors and families. Technology, data, storytelling, and brand experience must work together as one system.
This infrastructure includes EmpowerEd by ACE Scholarships, the organization’s scholarship management technology platform. It is designed to support growth on a national scale. At the center of the strategy are two key groups: donors and families. Her role is to make a complex opportunity simple and relatable. Technology and marketing provide the framework, while educational opportunity remains the ultimate goal for children.
Cultivating Leadership
For Kristy, team building is central to her approach to leadership. She has managed teams ranging from six to 55 people and starts with trust. She hires people based on their strengths and gives them the freedom to use those strengths without micromanagement.
She gives her teams three clear priorities: a clear destination, ownership of the path, and accountability for the outcome. She also uses opportunities as a way to develop people. She may assign responsibilities before someone feels fully prepared and then coach them through the experience rather than taking over.
She encourages her teams to challenge ideas, including her own. She follows the principle that the strongest idea should succeed regardless of a person’s title. Her long-term measure of success is not a team that depends on her presence in every room. It is a group of capable leaders who can confidently step into those rooms without her.
Navigating Change
During acquisitions, mergers, and organizational integrations, Kristy has played a strategic role in managing change. She has seen how quickly uncertainty can affect a workforce when leaders do not address it directly. Executives often focus on the practical aspects of change, such as organizational structures, systems, budgets, and timelines. Employees, however, often have more personal questions about belonging, roles, and identity.
She views brand and marketing as important tools for addressing these concerns. A strong brand can serve as an internal guide as well as an external promise. Her approach during transitions focuses on early and consistent communication. She also values honesty about what leadership does not yet know. At the same time, she believes in preserving what already works instead of replacing it without a clear reason.
The Human Edge in AI
Looking ahead, Kristy expects artificial intelligence to make human skills more valuable. She sees AI continuing to improve analysis, personalization, and content creation. However, when everyone has access to similar tools, efficiency becomes less of a competitive advantage.
Skills such as judgment, curiosity, empathy, and authenticity will become increasingly important. She also expects the traditional boundaries between marketing, technology, product, data, and customer experience to continue to fade. The next generation of marketing leaders will need to understand how these functions work together and how each contributes to business results.
Career Reinvention
Kristy is also a vocal advocate for career reinvention among senior professionals and serves as a board advisor in this area. She challenges the idea that careers must follow a straight path. Experience builds valuable skills and insights that can transfer across industries.
Her advice to professionals considering a career change is to look beyond the roles they are qualified for. Instead, they should focus on the problems they are uniquely equipped to solve.
Legacy Through Leadership
When asked about the next chapter of her career, Kristy says that impact now matters more to her than titles. She wants to help organizations grow with clarity and integrity. She also wants her leadership legacy to continue through the people she has developed. For her, success is measured by how many of those individuals become confident leaders in their own right.
This goal is especially meaningful at ACE Scholarships. She sees organizational growth as an opportunity to help more children and families gain access to education. For her, that impact extends beyond any single business metric.
