The smallest number in Jeff Roman’s career may be the most revealing: one. In 2013, he launched feedONE at Convoy of Hope, putting an individual child at the center of an international fundraising proposition. The name made a large undertaking feel approachable. You could understand your part before anyone finished explaining the organization.
A year later, the initiative had raised nearly $800,000, triple its previous year’s support. Roman, then vice president of marketing and feedONE, described support for 6,500 children across 10 countries. Those figures belong to a collective effort: donors, partners and the people procuring and delivering food. His place in that effort helps explain the career that followed. He was working on the connection between wanting to help and knowing how.
Today, Roman is a co-founder of EPIC, the agency he established with Jennifer Willingham in 2019. His work crosses strategy, fundraising, organizational decisions and execution. It is an occupation with relatively few cinematic props. A person untangling a campaign is unlikely to demand a wind machine. But a good plan has its own drama: suddenly, people can move.
The arithmetic of one
International need can overwhelm an audience before an appeal has properly begun. Numbers grow, the map expands, and an ordinary person’s contribution starts to look comically small. The feedONE name reverses the perspective. Begin with a comprehensible act. Let the organization handle the larger machinery.
The distinction matters in Roman’s story because the machinery was substantial. Raising money required relationships; fulfilling the promise required operations. In the 2015 account of the initiative’s previous year, Roman credited supporters for making procurement and delivery possible. He spoke as someone connecting those worlds, with the appeal at one end and a practical obligation at the other.
Initiative results reported by Convoy of Hope in summer 2015. A shared effort, with Roman serving as vice president of marketing and feedONE.
That is a more useful introduction to him than a catalogue of executive titles. The enduring question is how to give people a manageable way into something ambitious. It connects a feeding initiative to an agency brief, even when the deliverables look nothing alike.
A change of destination
Roman’s earlier working life included roughly a decade selling cars, followed by leadership in publicly traded businesses. The sequence is an unusual preparation for nonprofit marketing, though perhaps less unusual once you consider what each requires. A proposition has to make sense to another person. Enthusiasm from the person offering it only gets the conversation started.
He left the corporate world in 2010 and moved into nonprofit leadership. At Convoy of Hope, he served as vice president of marketing; by 2017, he was also being introduced as executive director of integrated marketing and feedONE. His experience included business development and fundraising partnerships involving NFL Alumni, eBay and American Airlines.
The career change carried commercial skills into a different setting. Revenue development became connected to mission, donor participation and the ability to keep a promise over time. A campaign could attract attention and still leave an organization with work to do. Someone had to make the relationship useful beyond its announcement.
Roman’s leadership experience also includes CityServe International, where he was a founding leader. Its 2018 tax filing lists him as executive director. Across these roles, his work moved through organizations that depend on people choosing to participate. The essential transaction was becoming broader than a purchase.
Before EPIC, a shared address book
In August 2018, ICON Media Group announced Roman’s arrival as a partner. The company was expanding from media relations into a wider marketing offer, and he would lead the move into branding, digital marketing, social media and nonprofit support. It was a specific assignment, bringing additional capabilities into a business already working in faith-based publishing and entertainment.
Willingham was already a partner there, alongside Paige Collins and Shanon Stowe. So the eventual EPIC partnership had a working history before it had a company name. Roman’s contribution at ICON concerned the practical expansion of what clients could buy and what the agency could deliver.
The announcement explained that clients had been asking for additional services with the same personal attention. That is a wonderfully unromantic origin for a business opportunity: customers wanted help with the next thing, too. Roman arrived to organize that next thing. In 2019, he and Willingham founded EPIC.
- 2010Leaves corporate work for nonprofit leadership.
- 2013Launches feedONE at Convoy of Hope.
- 2018Joins ICON Media Group as a partner.
- 2019Co-founds EPIC with Jennifer Willingham.
A partnership with an unexpected wardrobe
Among Roman’s nonprofit partnerships, one deserves a brief detour through the underwear drawer. In 2017, clothing brand Marc Skid featured feedONE as a charity partner. The connection brought an everyday consumer product into a campaign supporting children overseas.
Roman explained the partnership through a shared willingness to notice a need and act on it. The explanation contains very little marketing vocabulary. It gives the two organizations a shared reason to act, without pretending that they do the same work.
“they saw a need and wanted to do something about it.”
Jeff Roman, discussing Marc Skid’s partnership with feedONE, 2017
The charm is in the mismatch. International fundraising and Pima cotton underwear are unlikely neighbors until someone supplies a sensible connection. Roman’s work has repeatedly involved finding that connection between organizations, audiences and an action they can take together. Sometimes the partnership arrives wearing a suit. Occasionally, it has a waistband.
The practical writer, and the believer
Roman writes in a voice that can be considerably less formal than his job titles. His agency blog covered copywriting, online donations, Apple’s privacy changes, Facebook’s renaming and Amazon’s charity program. These were subjects with immediate consequences for organizations trying to reach people through platforms they did not control.
In March 2021, he also wrote about working on a project with Drew Brees alongside a friend named Kirk. What caught his attention was the athlete’s passion beyond the field. Even the celebrity anecdote returned to the question of what someone’s commitment produces when the familiar setting falls away.
His later LinkedIn writing makes his Christian faith explicit. Posts from March 2025 connect biblical passages with conviction, leadership, choosing collaborators and handling resistance to growth. These are public statements of the ideas he wants to discuss, alongside the technical concerns of marketing. His writing makes room for both a platform update and a question of belief.
The combination fits his professional world. EPIC works with nonprofits, ministries, authors, publishers and filmmakers. Understanding how people describe their convictions is part of communicating with them. Roman’s faith is also personal: he identifies it, together with marriage, family and fatherhood, among the things that matter to him.
The work outside the campaign
Roman’s involvement with children’s organizations extends beyond his agency clients. He served on the board of Home School Academy from September 2015 to June 2016, with responsibilities described as guidance on operations and financial stewardship. From January 2017 through December 2019, he was also a board member at Camp Sue Osborn.
That second connection reached back further. He had worked as a counselor at the camp between July 1991 and July 1995. The progression from counselor to board member brings two different forms of responsibility into the same biography: working directly with campers, then returning years later to organizational oversight. It is a quieter continuity than a company launch, and a telling one.
His education record includes Southeastern University from 2014 to 2018, overlapping his nonprofit career. Together, these commitments widen the picture beyond campaigns and partnerships. There were organizations to help govern as well as audiences to reach. The operational concerns that appear throughout his professional life also had a place in his volunteer work.
A donation needs somewhere to go
In March 2021, Roman joined Tosha Anderson on A Modern Nonprofit Podcast to discuss raising donations through online marketing. Their subjects included social media, awareness, hashtags and branding for newer nonprofits. The setting was practical: how does an organization use the tools available to it to invite support?
There is an everyday difficulty inside that question. People encounter a cause in one place, learn about it in another and decide whether to give somewhere else. The organization must remain recognizable through the journey. For a founder whose experience stretches across corporate sales, donor campaigns and agency work, these are connected problems.
His Forbes Agency Council biography expresses the preference succinctly: “taking BIG ideas and turning them into realistic, actionable steps”. The capital letters supply the ambition. The steps supply the work. A grand plan eventually needs someone to decide what happens on Tuesday.
The company, and the person inside it
EPIC’s work now brings together publicity, creative production, digital marketing and nonprofit fundraising. The agency reports more than 2,500 projects delivered and over $250 million raised for nonprofit partners. These are company figures, representing a team’s work across client relationships. They describe the setting in which Roman operates, rather than a personal scorecard.
The personal thread remains easier to follow at smaller scale. A prospective partner needs a reason to join. A donor needs an understandable invitation. Colleagues need a decision they can act on. Roman has moved between industries while continuing to work on those moments of agreement.
His stated interest in building things that last gives that work a longer horizon than launch day. The useful outcome is an organization able to carry its work forward, with people who understand their part in it. After corporate leadership, international campaigns and agency founding, the number one still makes a fitting place to begin: one clear proposition, one workable commitment, one person who knows what to do next.