Meet Sabrina McMillin. She’s one of those women who has twenty projects going at once, and has the creativity and drive to support them all.
Sabrina is an account director at Grey Horse Communications, a New York-based feminist PR firm, where she helped produce a study on what she calls the Self-Promotion Gap. The study showed that women prefer to downplay their accomplishments.
Sabrina is in the midst of developing a podcast about mixed-race issues. She is also directing an upcoming program at South By Southwest on Donald Trump and the Modern Presidency. Her essay, "The Fandomization of Political Figures" will be featured in The Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures later this year. She also volunteers for the Beloved Brooklyn, a Jewish community, by running its digital community.
Sabrina talked with She Spends about her ongoing projects and shared advice for readers who hope to have a career similar to hers.
(editor’s note: this interview has been edited and condensed for clarity)
Tell me about what you do!
I am an account director at Grey Horse Communications. It’s a feminist full-service PR and digital communications firm. We do everything from small salon dinners and conferences in real life to major publicity campaigns online. Working here is a lot like startup life. It’s a smaller company and even when we work with big clients, we do everything. I have a lot of oversight and control over the work that I do. I work with an amazing team of all women. I get to do everything from the day to day client work to new business development. Being in publicity is like being a professional schmoozer, so I like to meet new reporters or interesting people doing things online and having coffee or drinks with them. That’s the most exciting part too, getting to know the community.
I manage Grey Horse’s books practice. I did publicity and digital strategy for a book called Reckoning: The Epic Battle Against Sexual Abuse and Harassment by Linda Hirshman, which was one of the first books about the #metoo movement. I also worked on the launch campaign for the book Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger by Soraya Chemaly. I’ve worked with Amnesty International on reviving its annual media awards and did social media consulting for the United Nations.
For someone who wants to get into the field of PR, especially for a brand that has such a clear mission like Grey Horse, what advice can you offer?
I got into publicity and PR in a very grassroots kind of way. When I was in college, I was the volunteer coordinator for the Harry Potter Alliance, which is an international nonprofit. A lot of the work was just finding people’s email addresses, putting them into a spreadsheet, and then cold emailing.
Grey Horse is my first full-time PR gig. I was really just waiting for it to be different from the work I’ve been doing before. I didn’t study it in school or hadn’t worked for a specific firm, so I thought there would be more to it. It really is just going out there and meeting people and finding the right connections. I didn’t come from a wealthy family, I came from the working class and was a scholarship student at my school. I couldn’t afford to do unpaid internships. So I explored side hustles only after I graduated from college. Just building up those experiences gave me a leg up that helped launch my media career. I recommend either getting some experience in PR or journalism. A lot of my colleagues came from journalism. The market is really tough, so journalists will move over to PR.
You’re working on starting a podcast, right?
Yep! My fiance and I are both mixed race, so we’re starting a show called Not That White. We will be interviewing interesting, noteworthy mixed-race people from around the world. Usually, they have some sort of creative project, and I want to talk to them about how their identities influence the work they do. I hope to launch it in the spring, but I’m also planning a wedding, so it’s never easy.
What inspires you?
There is a book that I like to give as a gift to other women in my life. I actually met the author two years ago. It is called Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?: And Other Questions You Should Have Answers to When You Work in the White House, and it was written by Alyssa Mastromonaco. She was the deputy chief of staff in the Obama administration. When I read that in 2017, it felt like it was reaching out directly to me. We had such a similar career path in many ways. It inspires me to keep pushing forward and keep working.
I got to meet her through my work a few years ago. I shared some of the stories from my life, and she told me to write it down in case I ever write a memoir. I always thought that was good advice.
