Profile • Marketing & Growth
The Political Operative Who Learned to Sell Tax and Insurance
She swapped Capitol Hill for the corner office of marketing, and now she has to make accounting, tax and insurance sound like something worth reading. Here is how a campaign operative became the brand voice of a $2.8 billion firm.
Most people picture a marketer as someone who wants attention. Donna Mirandola learned the trade somewhere the attention was never guaranteed and rarely friendly: a political campaign. She started her working life on Capitol Hill, in the offices of the U.S. House of Representatives, then went west to work a U.S. Senate race in California as a deputy press secretary and field director. That is a job where every word gets rationed, every audience is skeptical, and the scoreboard is public on a single night in November.
She never quite left that world behind. She just changed the product. Over the next two decades the thing she was selling shifted from a candidate to enterprise software, then to jet engines and turbines, then to silver mines, then to global risk advisory, and now to accounting, tax, benefits and insurance. The audience changed too, from voters to chief financial officers. The underlying craft stayed the same. Take something complicated that people are inclined to ignore, and make them care.
In August 2024, CBIZ named her its Chief Marketing Officer, a Senior Vice President role she stepped into on the 26th of that month after the firm ran a national search. She replaced a long-tenured marketing leader who had retired the year before. And she walked in at a genuinely strange moment, which is part of what makes the story interesting.
01 / The TimingA firm doubling in size, and someone had to explain it
CBIZ is not a household name, but it is a large one. It provides accounting, tax, advisory, benefits, insurance and technology services to businesses across the United States, mostly to the middle market, the mid-sized companies that are too big for a local bookkeeper and too small to command a Big Four relationship. When Mirandola arrived, CBIZ was in the middle of closing its acquisition of Marcum, a deal valued at roughly $2.3 billion that completed on November 1, 2024. The combination pushed CBIZ toward $2.8 billion in annualized revenue and into the top tier of American professional services firms of its kind.
Think about what that means for a marketing chief. Two firms, two client lists, two internal cultures, two ways of describing more or less the same work, all folding into one brand at the same time she was still learning where the coffee was. Merger integration is often described as a numbers problem. A lot of it is a language problem. Someone has to decide what the combined company sounds like, and get thousands of people to say it the same way.
Her mandate at CBIZ reads the way most CMO mandates read on paper: elevate the brand, expand digital reach, improve the client experience, and turn the firm's leaders into recognized voices in their fields. The difference is the raw material. It is one thing to build demand for a flashy consumer app. It is another to build it for cost segregation studies, transfer pricing, and ASC 740 tax accounting, subjects that make even the people who need them reach for a second cup of coffee.
02 / The RouteFive industries, one job title
The clearest way to understand Mirandola is to look at where she has worked, because the list looks like wandering until you notice the pattern. After politics she joined Oracle, the enterprise software company, working in global communications and customer marketing. Then General Electric, the industrial giant. Then Coeur Mining, where she spent about two years as Director of Corporate Communications, learning to talk about an industry that outsiders routinely misjudge. Then Aon, the global professional services and risk firm, where she climbed through increasingly senior roles.
At Aon she reached the title of Chief Marketing Officer, Growth Marketing. In that seat she built and ran four regional teams spanning North America, Latin America, the UK and EMEA, and Asia-Pacific, more than 150 people in all. Their job was to drive go-to-market work, engagement, demand and pipeline growth for a business generating roughly $13 billion in revenue. Running marketing at that scale is less about clever taglines and more about logistics: aligning dozens of product lines, keeping a consistent voice across time zones, and proving to finance that the pipeline is real.
That is the throughline. Each stop looks like a detour and functions like a rehearsal. Politics taught message discipline. Oracle taught scale and the enterprise sales cycle. GE taught rigor. Mining taught how to represent an industry the public gets wrong. Aon taught how to run a global marketing operation and tie it to revenue. By the time CBIZ came calling, she had a resume with unusual range that all pointed in one direction.
03 / The TrainingMedill, and the case for communications-first marketing
Her education bookends the pivot neatly. She earned a bachelor's degree in political science and history from Saint Mary's College, the credentials of someone headed for public life. Then, at the hinge point of her career, a Master of Science in integrated marketing communications from Northwestern University's Medill school, one of the programs that treats marketing as a discipline built on top of communications rather than advertising.
That framing matters for how she works. A lot of marketing starts with the campaign and bolts on a message. The communications-first version runs the other way. Decide what is true and worth saying, get the story straight, then build the channels around it. It is a useful instinct in professional services, where trust is the entire product and a client is really buying the judgment of people they cannot fully evaluate in advance.
04 / The BetWhy the boring industries are the good ones to market
There is a quiet logic to spending a career on subjects other people avoid. The harder a thing is to explain, the more valuable a clear explanation becomes. Consumer brands compete in a crowded, noisy field where everyone is fluent in marketing. B2B services like tax and audit and insurance are the opposite. The bar for clarity is low, which means a firm that manages to sound human and confident stands out immediately.
CBIZ is betting on exactly that. The growth plan leans on thought leadership, on turning partners and specialists into people worth following, on regulatory updates and practical guidance that a business owner actually reads instead of deletes. Done well, that kind of content is not decoration on the sale. It is the sale, arriving early, before a prospect has picked up the phone. It is a strategy that rewards patience and punishes fluff, which suits a marketer trained where fluff gets you beaten on election night.
Recognition has started to catch up with the resume. In 2024, Crain's Cleveland Business included her on its "New Faces in New Places" list, a nod to the executives reshaping the region's biggest companies. CBIZ is headquartered in Independence, Ohio, though Mirandola is based in New York, which fits a career that has always been more about reach than any single zip code.
05 / What Comes NextMaking one firm out of two
The real test is not the appointment. It is the integration. A firm that nearly doubled overnight now has to feel like a single company to the client on the other end of the invoice. That is a branding job and a change-management job at the same time, the sort of assignment that does not resolve in a quarter and does not photograph well for a press release. It resolves slowly, in the accumulation of a thousand small consistencies: the same voice on the website, the same promise in the pitch, the same experience whether a client walks into the old CBIZ or the old Marcum.
She has done versions of this before, at a scale most marketers never touch. The candidate has changed, the product has changed, the audience has changed. The job, the one she first learned in a campaign office with a deadline and a skeptical crowd, is the same as it ever was. Say the true thing in a way people remember, and get everyone to say it the same way.
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