Dr. Jenni Torres has spent more than 30 years in education, across five states, Puerto Rico, and Colombia, working as a teacher, curriculum developer, and researcher. She is also a parent in a bilingual family. When we were working together at Waterford.org, she was the Chief Academic Officer and she and her team built the CARES family engagement framework. Dr. Jenni Torres, WIDA Executive Director CARES stands for communication, academic content, relationships, expectations,

BREAKING NEWS: Having a communication plan is essential. Seriously though, most founders and executives I work with don't realize that until something goes wrong. Without a solid strategic communication plan, your message can get lost, misunderstood, or completely ignored. That's why I'm sharing a straightforward guide that will help you develop an effective strategic communication plan that works. Let's get going... Your Strategic Communication Planning Guide: Why It Matters

A founder walked into a meeting with pages of AI-generated thinking. The documents were polished and comprehensive. There were target markets, feature lists, competitive positioning, user personas, pricing strategies. I could tell he felt really good sharing it with me, but I was overwhelmed and confused. "Which of these are you actually going to build?" I asked. He couldn’t answer. Man drafts a 200 page AI brainstorm This founder had great insight: families are drowning in

"Do I need a communications consultant if someone already handles comms?" is usually asked by someone who's fairly sure the answer is no. They already have someone so why bring on a comms strategist? But what they usually have is someone executing tasks, and that is a different job. I found that exact problem the moment I was brought on to help improve an organization's content. The first person I consulted was the head of comms. She turned out to be strictly PR: media relati

Ask ten people what a brand refresh actually involves and nine will describe a new logo, an updated color palette, maybe a cleaner website. That's the version design agencies sell, and it's real work, but it's only part of the job. So what is a brand refresh, really? There are visual components, but it's also the message and the positioning underneath it. The thing the visuals are supposed to represent. New paint on an unclear story may look better, but not much else changes.

A brand is a snapshot of one moment. It captures who a company is, what it sells, and who it sells to on the day someone sits down to name it. The trouble starts when a company keeps moving but the snapshot doesn't. For seven years I watched an education nonprofit try to solve that exact problem with everything except the one fix that would have worked. Every time the brand felt off, the answer was a refresh. Brighter colors, a cleaner deck, a better vision statement. Leaders

"We have a strategy," the co-founder yelled. "Make videos." Videos are a tactic, not a strategy. A strategy is the thinking that decides whether the videos are worth making at all, and he didn't know the difference. He'd given himself the title of head of marketing without ever having done a day of it, then hired two people with years of experience to do what he said and nothing more. My colleague and I started where you're supposed to start, with a strategy and the tactics t

So often, the best ideas come from chance meetings. That was the case for a founder I’m currently working with. That meeting was at church with a refugee who had just moved to Salt Lake. From that conversation, this founder took a trip to Africa, met a young boy who asked for a soccer ball. He returned months later with not one, but one hundred soccer balls for that community. Two years after that, sixteen girls were standing at the Women's World Cup. Young Women Playing Socc

A shifting message can be frustrating. For many leaders, the first instinct is to fix the communication. They hire a new writer, build a brand guide, and run a messaging workshop. When the inconsistency continues, they can't understand why. I do. Brand message consistency starts at the top, not in a guide. If the leaders of the organization have not agreed on the message, no amount of fabulous writing is going to fix that. The Importance of Brand Message Consistency Brand mes

Most leaders who commit to thought leadership do it by showing up consistently. They start a newsletter, produce content, post on LinkedIn. Then, they wait, but the needle hardly moves. So, they take the next step, they expand their topics and bring in more variety but the results stay flat. They are clearly not missing output. What they’re missing is a point of view. The Founder Who Got It Right I worked with a founder in the education space who had cracked something that mo

In 2019, I worked for an early education nonprofit that was gaining national traction. Our program helped children learn to read no matter where they lived, no matter their native language, even if they didn't have a brick-and-mortar preschool anywhere near them. We were doing real work in places most early literacy programs couldn't reach. But traction brings attention, and not all of it is the kind you want. Especially in a field that survives on limited funding and public

I have a confession to make. I always say founders are so close to their work that they find it hard to tell their story. Well, that includes me. When someone asks what I do, I find it hard to explain because I do a lot. The answer truly depends on the client. Sometimes, I write messaging for a company that has never put its story on paper. Other times, I help a founder reconfigure their pitch deck or prepare for an upcoming speech. Occasionally, I sit in a strategy meeting w

When I was a reporter, every time I sat down for an interview, I had two jobs: find the most compelling angle of the story, and pull out the facts so viewers could make their own assessment. The problem is, most people are giving you their polished version that they rehearsed over and over before the camera started rolling. My job was to find the story underneath. That instinct did not go away when I left the newsroom. Now I just use it on behalf of my clients instead. What a

Before you hire a communications consultant, read this. Most messaging fails not because the words are wrong, but because the leadership team was never aligned to begin with.

You have a media interview coming up. It could be a reporter from the local news or someone who covers your industry and has a reputation for asking hard questions. How do you approach media interview prep? Many leaders start by trying to anticipate every possible question and draft answers to each one. They run through worst-case scenarios and try to overly prepare. That approach is exactly backwards, and it is why so many interviews don't go well at all. What Reporters Are

I once sat in a leadership meeting and asked every person in the room the same question: What does this organization do? They wrote their answers on post-it notes and put them on posters around the room. When the exercise was complete, no one said the same thing. Not even close to the same thing. Hand writing on a Post-it note on a wall covered in notes during a leadership messaging exercise They all had different audiences with different problems, so they used different lang

A founder came to me with a parent platform he was building. Smart guy, mission-driven, and genuinely onto something. He had watched parents drown in apps. Canvas for grades. Skyward for attendance. ClassDojo for classroom updates. Every school adding another tool, every tool requiring another login, and none of them talking to each other. Parents were getting more notifications and less information. He wanted to fix that. But when I read his investor slide deck, I got lost.

If an organization needs a Chief Communications Officer, but doesn't have one, it usually comes down to timing and salary. In these situations, a fractional leader could be an affordable solution. What is a Fractional CCO? Kim Fischer, Fractional CCO A fractional CCO is senior communications leadership without the full-time hire. You get an experienced executive with a real seat at the table. Someone who can diagnose the problem, build the structure, and align the team. For e

A mentor called me recently with feedback I did not ask for. He said: "You have a way of drawing people in. You could smile at me while stabbing me in the back with a knife and I wouldn't care. I'd give you what you want." I laughed. Then I sat with it. He meant presence. The kind that makes people lean in, trust you, want to be in the room with you. His point was that the woman he knew was nowhere on my website. He was right. I had done exactly what I advise every founder no

Two months ago, I started using AI to help me write. What came back seemed great. It touched everything I wanted it to, read cleanly, and sounded professional. I was pumped, so I posted it. I felt I had a writing partner that could help me increase my output without increasing my hours. Then nothing. Not bad feedback. Just silence. As a communicator, I am always studying why something lands and why it doesn't. So, I started reading other people's posts and began to see patter