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. Three People, Three Different Answers A few years ago,

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 patte

A mentor called me recently with some feedback I did not ask for. He said, " Your website is missing you. That picture of you in the white suit? That could be any random woman from Logan, Utah. That’s not you. 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, shaking my head. Then I realized he was right. That woman (I swear she’s not as scary as she sounds) was n

When a reporter comes looking for a story, they usually find one. Not always the one they came for. But something. I was running communications for an edtech nonprofit in the middle of a national scale. A vocal group of educators opposed to screen time had been pitching our organization as a cautionary tale to anyone who would listen. Most of the outlets that covered this group were small. I let those go. but then they landed an opinion writer at the Washington Post. This wom

I once sat down with a sales team that could not figure out why no one was buying. They had a thorough slide deck. It was deeply researched and built by smart people who wanted to sound like smart people. Within thirty seconds of opening it, my eyes crossed. Academic language. Research citations. A reference to something about a reading rope? Slide after slide of evidence that showed our curriculum team knew their stuff. But there was not a single slide about the people they

I once watched a CEO walk onto a stage in front of a room full of people who wanted to believe in him. He gripped the podium. He looked down at his notes. In between " ums ," he told the audience what he was about to say before he said it. He showed a generic picture of children and said he was "deeply moved by the possibility of kids." Then he showed a picture of a bird and nerded out on it for a minute before finding his way back to something called "core principles." The e

I met a young woman at a networking event recently. She founded a natural hair moisturizer line for Black hair . She had a presence that stopped conversations. Warm, certain, completely herself. She was frustrated with her business’s social media presence. She felt it had stalled. I looked up her pages when I got home. Product photos. Black History Month content. Promotional captions. All of it was fine. But it wasn’t her. A natural hair product line needs a passionate lead

Every real leadership moment carries a tension most people feel but rarely name. You're in the boardroom about to make a decision that will impact two hundred employees and their families. You are trying to care for people while protecting the organization’s bottom line. You’re expected to project empathy while holding a line that feels, at times, like a razor's edge. That tension doesn’t disappear with experience. You don’t outgrow it; you just get better at performing insid

Most communication breakdowns don’t start with conflict. They start earlier, when employees sense that something is changing and don’t yet understand what it means for them. Leaders are often deep into a decision long before it’s communicated. They’ve spent weeks working through data, constraints, and tradeoffs. They’ve debated options, ruled some out, and landed on a direction that feels necessary. By the time the message is shared, they feel settled in the decision because