Get to know our 2025 Torchie Awards finalists

The competition for the Torchie Awards was fierce this year, and our finalists represent the top tier in a field crowded with creativity. Let’s dive into the stories of our finalists for four categories: Bonfire Community Leader of the Year, Rising Marketing Star, Marketing Leader of the Year and Braze for Impact.

Bonfire Community Leader of the Year
This award recognizes a community member who stands out for helping other Braze users. We are continually impressed by the passion, dedication, and collaboration in the Braze Bonfire community. You all really look out for each other, and bring a spirit of innovation and desire to grow in everything you do. Let’s meet our finalists!

Allan Heo, Founder & CEO at For Now Marketing
Allan, a 2024 runner-up for Bonfire Community Leader of the Year, is a dedicated Braze professional who empowers the marketing community. As a Badge, Discussion, and Solutions Leader, he's a prolific contributor to the discussion boards, sharing educational resources and guides daily.

Daphné Leblanc, Director of Lifecycle Marketing & CRM at Spark Networks
As a Bonfire Marketer of the Month and a tenured Braze user, Daphné empowers her peers on their journey with Braze. During her popular Ask Me Anything session on Bonfire, she shared tactical ways to center personalization in a core lifecycle marketing strategy and expanded on trends from the 2025 Customer Engagement Review.

Lior Peleg, Co-Owner at HippoCampus Tech LTD
Lior is on a mission to create tools and content useful to all Braze users—and as a member of Braze Bonfire, he doesn't gatekeep! He's an active contributor to the discussion boards, sharing his expertise and valuable resources for the community to leverage.

Manoj Kumar, Technical Lead at Digitas
This is the second year in a row that Manoj has been a finalist for the Bonfire Community Leader of the Year, for good reason! Manoj consistently contributes to Bonfire, and is leader in Badges, Solutions, and Discussions. Whether he’s troubleshooting a bit of Liquid on someone’s post or helping them to understand how to push the boundaries of Canvas, Manoj is always willing to share his expertise.

Ted Scott, Sr. Solution Architect, Braze at Cognizant A long time Braze expert, Ted is extremely active on the Bonfire Community, both in answering questions and helping fellow community members out with problems big and small. He’s also passionate about the ever expanding Braze ecosystem of careers, and helps to boost and amplify roles posted on the Bonfire Job Board.

Rising Marketing Star

This award recognizes exceptional new users of the Braze platform who show great promise and use technology to support stronger customer relationships. While they might be new to customer engagement or to Braze, they are no stranger to success! Here’s a peek into their stories.

Divyanshu Pandey, Associate, CRM at Chegg 
Divyanshu, an exceptional early-career marketing technologist, earned four Braze certifications in one year and created automation scripts and validation checklists that have saved hours of manual work and become best practices across teams.

Ellie Ledwith, Sports Content Deputy Manager at bet365
Ellie played a critical role in her company's transition to Braze from outdated tools, leading the effort to create a complex and dynamic email footer system and training over 100 staff members.

Lindsey Spillman, CRM Specialist at Wendy’s
In just over a year, Lindsey transformed the CRM program at Wendy’s, increasing campaigns from 15 to over 50 unique touchpoints per month and achieving a 66% increase in loyalty sales year-over-year.

Maxim Radoczy, Lifecycle Marketing Lead, Engagement at Canva
Despite a lack of direct management experience, Maxim launched Canva’s first "Next Best Action" model, which delivered a 55% uplift in engagement, and is now leading an initiative that incorporates predictive models and generative AI.

Nicholas Baltovski, Lifecycle Marketing Manager at  Venmo
Nicholas went from no experience in lifecycle marketing to leading some of Venmo's most impactful programs, delivering millions in incremental profit and getting promoted twice in two years.

Marketing Leader of the Year

This award honors marketing executives who demonstrate excellence in leadership and customer engagement. They’re taking their team to new heights and their strategy to the next level, and have the results to prove it. See for yourself!

Jason Feldman, Senior Director, Customer Experience at BEES US
Jason championed the adoption of Braze to digitize operations across 26 countries, using advanced solutions like a dynamic email template that saves over 125 hours per month.

Josh Hanson, Associate Director - Growth Marketing at Optus Sport
Josh transformed the company's lifecycle marketing from a fragmented function into a strategic, data-driven engine, leading to a 50% increase in offers converted via Braze and a 5% increase in minutes watched.

Maria Bonello, Subscriber Engagement Director at MGM+
As a solo marketer, Maria built MGM+'s customer engagement program from the ground up, engineering a robust automation system using Connected Content and APIs to deliver real-time, dynamic messaging at scale.

Melissa Neikirk, Director of Lifecycle at Remitly
Melissa's empathetic and experimental approach to lifecycle marketing led to a 400x increase in daily email click-through rates and the creation of a digitized, full-year customer journey map that has been instrumental for cross-functional teams.

Pedro Solís Cámara, Head of Growth at RappiCard
As Head of Growth, Pedro created a unified vision that integrated growth, engagement, and financial performance, leading to a 40% increase in portfolio value and a 70% improvement in retention.

Braze for Impact

This award recognizes companies that have used the power of Braze to create positive social change within their communities. In addition to being recognized at our flagship event Forge, the winner of this award will also be able to direct a $10,000 grant from the Braze for Social Impact Fund to the charity of their choice.

Boys and Girls Club of America
Boys and Girls Club of America completely reimagined their internal and external communications with Braze, helping them improve their CEO email open rate by 5% and drive a 61% increase in email revenue from critical fundraising campaigns.

iFood
iFood used Braze to engage delivery drivers in two social impact initiatives: "My High School Diploma," a program aimed at completing high school and enabling drivers to enter higher education, and "Decola," which is an online course platform. This platform offers learning options for iFood's internal topics, as well as entrepreneurship, financial education, workplace safety, delivery safety, motorcycle maintenance, among others. Over the past year, iFood engaged more than 370,000 delivery drivers in the education initiative, with the educational platform on the app recording over 1 million course completions. Braze was instrumental in providing strategic, segmented, and automated communications, saving iFood's team time while enabling deeper and smarter data and strategy analysis.

Venmo
Venmo’s Small Business Grant initiative used Braze to generate over 150 million impressions, driving incremental business sign-ups and 50,000 grant applications to support small businesses from historically excluded communities.

Volo Sports
Through Canvas flows, Volo introduced new players to its charitable arm, the Volo Kids Foundation, driving a 41% volunteer recruitment rate and helping provide free youth sports programs to over 70,000 kids.

Ready to see who takes home the Torchie? 

Join us at Forge to celebrate all the finalists, learn from the best in the industry, and cast your vote for the People's Choice for Creative Excellence and the People’s Choice for Campaign of the Year. Whether you're a long-time member of the community or just getting started, Forge is where you’ll gain the insight, inspiration, and support to stand out by using your creativity in new ways.