Event CEO Podcast -- Episode 51

Carrie Fox, Founder and CEO of Mission Partners: Consistent Communication Strategy at Events—ECEO051

You are listening to Event CEO a podcast for executives who are looking to maximize their event ROI through business strategy, technology and innovation.  

Rebecca: Hi everyone.   Welcome to the Event CEO podcast by Linder Global Events, I’m your host Rebecca Linder.  Always delighted to be with you. 

Today we had an amazing conversation with Carrie Fox, she’s a communications expert and her contention is that an organization has to have their business strategy and communication strategy solidified and really dialed in before you can create an event. 

We’ve actually hired her organization, and she has hired us in the past to work with these national corporations that we do a lot of work for to help do that in order to actually effectively implement a concept around events. 

What I loved about today’s conversation is she really gave us new ways to communicate the message and how they can tangibly manifest at events.  And used an example that really took the gala format and it turned it on its head. 

So, think you are going to get a lot out of today, some real actionable concepts and really meaningful insights.   

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A little bit more about Carrie, Carrie as I said is a communications expert, she’s the founder of her organization called Mission Partners.  She works world-wide.  The organization is a strategic consultancy that actually guides high-potential, non-profits, foundations and socially responsible corporations in realizing their greatest social impact.  She has a conversation series called Mission Forward and it’s featured Pulitzer Prize winning journalist MacArther Fellows and some of the nation’s most sought-after philanthropic leaders. 

She has won many, many awards in 2016, Smart CEO Washington Bravo Award winner, in 2015 WWPR Women of the Year Honoree and in 2013 winner of PR Weeks Forty Under Forty.  She serves on several boards, the Greater Washington Community Foundation and also the Board of Trustees for Loyola University of Maryland.   

She is dynamic, smart, big thinker and she really gives us quite a bit of good information in this.  So, I look forward to you listening to it and getting some feedback from you, so enjoy. 

Rebecca: Carrie, as always, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show today, we are so excited to chat with you. 

Carrie: Thanks for having me. 

Rebecca: So, why don’t we start with the nature of our relationship.  So, we have a global event agency and we are often tasked with producing events, complicated events for clients, and one of the questions I always ask is around what are the results that they are looking for – and sometimes our clients don’t have those formulated well yet, because they are not in

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touch with their audiences.  And this is where we have reached out to you and Mission Partners and previously at CFOX Communications to take on the strategic communications piece of it. 

Talk about what that is, what that role is, why that relationship makes sense. 

Carrie: Sure.  First, I will say that we may be Mission Partners, but I think Linder has always, for as long as I can remember, been one of our best partners.  So, I’ve been learning from you and watching you for a long, long time.  And so, it’s nice to be here today to do this for you. 

Rebecca: Oh, you’re very kind, I feel the same way about you. 

Carrie: Yeah, you know we try to help fill that need that we’ve seen actually grow over the years for helping organizations better communicate their work, their mission, their impact in a way that moves people to take action.  And so, we think about ourselves as coming in and sitting next that senior leadership team, often inside a non-profit or a foundation, or a socially-minded business, and helping them make sense of what their strategy and their goals are so they can do something with it, right? 

They can really use communications to create and effect long-term change.  And I think you and I have been doing this work together since I think it was probably 2007/2008, when we first started supporting one another, and thinking about how much more rich each of those projects have been because we’ve been together working on them. 

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Rebecca: Yes.  And there is no question.  And so, let’s talk about sort of what that dynamic looks like for the audience. 

So, again, we come in we identify that, because it’s happened kind of in the reverse as well, but on our side, client is not entirely sure of what that call to action is at the event.  Of course, can we produce a great event, yes.  But we like to do it understanding what those outcomes are looking for are – and so in bringing you in, what is your process that you go through to help the client kind of identify that, so that we can then take that information and create an event around it that supports it.  We’re the container, you’re the content. 

Carrie: Yeah.  And before you can even get to content and communications, you have to understand the business strategy.  So, that’s where we start.  We help organizations right at the beginning understand what are you solving for – you know who are your key audiences?  What do you hope that they do as a result not just of this one event, but as a result of your efforts over the course of this year or this campaign or whatever it may be.  

So, we help organizations first understand what they are solving for.  And so, we will lead them through a variety of different problem-solving activities or retreats or facilitations, whatever they happen to be to develop their business strategy.  Then we take that business strategy and we put inside a communications strategy. 

So, we’re business strategists first, communication strategists second. 

Rebecca: Okay. 

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Carrie: And so, our work plays out in what might be messaging or talking points or a formal campaign of some sort that might include the advertising and the social media.  But nothing can happen until we are fully solid and in agreement on what that business strategy needs to look like. 

Rebecca: And then once that is solidified how does it play out at the event specifically? 

Carrie: Yeah.  So, hopefully, what it means is that – that mission has come to life in a way that hopefully people in the audience haven’t seen before.   

Now, just as you say, you want to create an event where someone walks in and they feel it, and they see it in every little detail.  You know that organization’s mission has come to life.  It’s going to fall flat if that leader of that organization or the voices of that organization get up on stage and they don’t play out that same message.  They don’t have that same kind of enthusiasm.  They don’t have a similar kind of call to action.  Where everything feels like it’s wrapped up in one experience together. 

So, our focus is not just making sure that all of the content mirrors and supports the event that’s being put together, but that the calls to action are there so that the event is the launching, hopefully, of a powerful campaign that can help that organization fund raise, grow its brand, grow its mission, build its advocacy effort, whatever it is.  It’s all setting it up for whatever comes after that event. 

And I’ve heard you talk about that a lot before. 

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Rebecca: Very much.  We feel like it’s critical to the success.  You’ve done this for a long time, and in various capacities with again national, global brands, non-profits, what are some of the biggest challenges you have with working – or what is the common misunderstanding corporations or organizations have around their current communications style or platforms or strategies I should say? 

Carrie: Right.  Well, there are couple of things.  And one I will quote someone that we both know very well, our good friend Kristen who, when I first launched this firm, as you said as CFOX in 2004, and announced to her and several others that we knew in our shared world that I was going to be building a firm that focused exclusively on non-profits and foundations.  Organizations who say what we do, we do for the good of others.  And she said, “You’re crazy.  It’s never going to work.  Those are the organizations that don’t have the money, it’s very noble of you, good luck.” 

Rebecca: Fast forward to 2018. 

Carrie: And I was proud, and she and I still talk about that.  Proud to say that it worked, and we knew it was going to work, because the question you asked me, you know what challenges do you come up against?  Many times the perception is that the non-profits and foundations have limited resources and so, they can’t think about doing things at a certain level.  

The reality is that’s where creativity comes in, right?  And nimbleness and getting smarter in how you use the resources that you have and relying more on your community partners or your corporate partners to make some of those things happen. 

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And I think that’s what we’ve been able to do so many times over the years, is to help organizations think beyond the dollars on their balance sheet, to what are you trying to achieve?  What’s your big goal, and how do you get there, right?  

It’s all about thinking creatively about using the resources that you have in-house as well as the resources that are surrounding you and supporting you. 

Rebecca: And you always use a quote by George Bernard Shaw.  Let’s hear your quote. 

Carrie: Yes.  So, the single biggest problem in communications is the illusion that it is taking place.   

Rebecca: Elaborate. 

Carrie: So, this is the other piece that we are often brought in on that organizations will say, a leader of an organization will say, we’ve got a great message, we’ve got a great mission, and yet we go in to make our pitch and we just feel like it’s just going right over people’s heads, right?  We’re not connecting with people.   

What’s happening?  What’s wrong?  The reality is they are not connecting with people, it’s however they’re developing or sharing that message it’s just not connecting, right?  So, the other piece of our work beyond helping organizations think about how they use the resources wisely, and creatively, is how they flip the way they talk about their work in a way that can me more compelling and connected to their key audiences. 

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So, instead of spending time saying, this is my agenda, Rebecca, I’m going to tell you what we’re doing, and how we’re doing it and we matter, and I am going to push that agenda on you and I’m going to hope that you see it and support it too.  Flipping it completely around and saying there’s something that we both care about so much, and that’s the future of our community.  Or that’s the health of our children or whatever that issue might be. 

So, starting in a place where we can agree on whatever the outcome is and then building your story, so that you’ve got advocates along the way that want to be there with you and supporting you. 

As, I said in the beginning, you know you can’t move that message along, if you don’t have really strong spokes people inside the organization who believe the message and know how to deliver the message. 

Rebecca: And this can play out, and to just give the audience sort of a sense, this is playing out at board meetings, gala’s… 

Carrie: Every single time. 

Rebecca: Conferences, I mean there’s no scenario that that doesn’t play out in. 

Carrie: No, every single member of any organization is a spokesperson.  And they should think about them as such, right?  Whether you are answering the phones, the reception, or you are the most junior member of the team, or if you are a member of the senior staff.  You all have people that you are talking to in some capacity or another, and so if you’re not sharing that same kind of enthusiasm and focus and understanding of what the organization is

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trying to do, and where the organization is trying to go – how can you expect the outside world to understand it and do something, right? 

Rebecca: Yes, agreed wholeheartedly.  I mean it has to sort of cascade throughout every aspect of your organization, of your membership, if that’s the case. 

Carrie: Right. 

Rebecca: Question though, so how – so we’ve talked about sort of why it’s important and who it’s important to educate about it, both in the audience as well as in the team environment or the organizational environment.  And in events we’re often bringing in people externally.  Whether it’s a conference or a gala or we’re doing honoree’s, whatever those things, how does this strategy piece of it get communicated to those folks?  And what is the expectation?  And because you have this new kind of focus, how does it influence how you go about talking, getting speakers to come, or getting additional people or selecting your honorees. 

Carrie: Yeah.  I think it starts with making sure that at the beginning of any event, there is a clear understanding, again, of what that message frame is – so if I think about the work that you and I have done together in the most recent years, that’s where we’ve started, right? 

We’ve said, what are we trying to achieve here?  And let’s make sure that the event’s team and the communication’s team, and the development team, and the advocacy team, that they all get that, and that as more vendors come in to support us, they’ve got to understand that too. 

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It’s almost like thinking about a brand style guide in some way, right?  But it’s the event style guide or the message style guide, that any time you bring in someone new, they are going to come with their own understanding and their own assumptions, and so it’s up to us as the core members of the team to makes sure that we are always all on the same page with what we are solving for. 

Rebecca: I actually really love the idea of the event style guide.  That’s a great concept. 

Carrie: Yeah. 

Rebecca: We will be doing that, please hold.  Let’s talk about brand as well.  So, strategic communication, we’ve talked about it from the strategy side, but it also affects the brand, the colors, the logos, those kinds of things as well.  Where do you as a strategic communications company impact that as well? 

Carrie: Yes.  So, we often sit, we either can be the ones responsible for that, so we are looking at both the strategy, what we are solving for, what our goals are, how we measure our success out of this event, what the words will be that we want to use and share, and then what the visuals are to support that.  So, we want those words and those visuals to work as closely together as possible. 

In some cases, we serve as the creative consultant, and so we’re offering support, feedback and guidance to in-house graphics team.  In other cases, we are supporting it.   

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So, we just did an event for a children’s hospital.  Who is making their way into the D.C. market, and it was one of their first events in this market.  They knew they needed to be thinking really carefully about how they were presenting a new brand.   

And so, we served as the consultants to make sure that everything was consistent from beginning to end.  And sometimes we think about ourselves as the brand cops.  Making sure that every little piece matches.   

More likely though, we like to support and create an internal brand cop, we know that we are not always going to be at the table for the long-term with or clients.  We want to help them build their internal strengths, so that they can do it by themselves the next time. 

So, many times we are creating structures and templates that they can use to be really successful in their first event experience and they can then do by themselves, hopefully, the next time. 

Rebecca: Yeah.  So, you almost make yourself redundant from that perspective. 

Carrie: Right. 

Rebecca: Never on the strategy side, but on the brand development side. 

Carrie: Completely, yeah. 

Rebecca: Yeah, which makes total sense.  All right, so you’re an event-goer too, so you go to all of these events, you produce events, you’re involved in the creation of them.  Talk to us about what you are seeing out

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there, what are you – this is more about your intuition, what do you see coming down the pipe?  What’s changing?  What do you like about events right now?  What’s exciting to you?  What’s some cool technology or just cool anything that you’re witnessing right now? 

Carrie: Yeah.  So, there’s a couple of things.  So, one I’m seeing the shift away from the traditional gala event, where you have hundreds of people who come and sit down for a meal and listen to a program and give a gift and walk away to more experiential events.  Where people have an opportunity to embed into the organization, understand it more, be part of the organization’s future, I think those are really exciting. 

And so, it’s beyond just I’m going pay for a ticket to this event and feel good about it to I’m going to have more of a stake in this event’s future. 

Rebecca: What does that actually look like?  How does that manifest itself? 

Carrie: Yes.  So, the one that I’ve been really happy to participate in in recent years is Covenant House’s CE0 Sleepout. 

Rebecca: Okay. 

Carrie: Have you heard about this? 

Rebecca: No. 

Carrie: So, this is – there are no ballgowns involved, you are literally sleeping on the streets of Southeast D.C., so I became a fundraiser for Covenant House and turned to my community, helped me raise funds for that

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event, but it was one very, very cold night in Thanksgiving.  We were given a brown paper bag and a cardboard box and sleeping back and slept out with about 30 other CEO’s and it was an idea to say, let’s put all of the fancy stuff aside and really see what we’re facing here.  So, we spent the first part of the evening meeting young people who have been supported by Covenant House, whether they be young people in foster care or young people…I met one young woman who became pregnant while she was still in high school and the day she told her parents they said, goodbye, we’re done.  You’re on your own now, and that night she was homeless, and she had to figure it out.  And so, she found Covenant House. 

So, it’s been a really fascinating experience to be able to put yourself inside the causes that you care about.   

Rebecca: Wow. 

Carrie: So, that for me has been unbelievable. 

Rebecca: And is this a part of – are you infusing this into your conversations around strategy and how they manifest themselves on the event side? 

Carrie: Yeah.  I think there are a lot of opportunities where organizations can think about how they bring their mission and their impact and their community right to the event experience that they are trying to create.   

The other one that I was not part of in any way, but think is fascinating is – have you heard about Lauren Powell Jobs, her new Carne y Arena exhibit? 

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Rebecca: No. 

Carrie: So, it was in downtown D.C. for a number of weeks.  It was set up so that policy makers could go in and see the real effects of immigration. 

Rebecca: Oh, yes, I did, yes, yes, yes. 

Carrie: And it’s all virtual reality. 

Rebecca: Amazing. 

Carrie: Unbelievable experience.  As a way that also virtual reality is coming into the event experience.  That had nothing to do with raising funds, it had everything to do with educating and informing and moving people who may think one way about immigration but may want to actually understand the whole story.  So, that experience is set up where you go in, you’re sitting in a holding cell, you have to take off your shoes, you put on your VR goggles.   

You go into this big room all of the lights are off, you step into sand, lights come on and you realize that you are at the border and you have five minutes to cross it.  And as you are looking around and your VR glasses are working, you realize there are helicopters overhead and there’s people rushing by you, and it ends where – it’s a fairly traumatic scene, right at the end, but you are faced – face to face with danger, and that’s the experience that a lot of people are facing. 

It’s their coming to America, looking for something.  So, it’s really interesting the power of technology, I think to bring experiences that many of us won’t

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necessarily see first-hand in our lives, bring that to us, and helping us understand what we can do as a result of those experiences. 

Rebecca: I think we are going to see more and more of it.  And prior to the technology, I remember when Charity Water did this years ago, where you did enter in your ballgown, and the first thing they had you do was pick up two suitcases full of water, and walk a bit of a catwalk to just understand, that somebody is doing this for ten miles a day, your are doing it for a 30-foot stretch.  Just to sort of embody kind of what that experience is, but I think fast-forward between AI and what’s coming in hologram technology, and what we are seeing in VR, I think you’re going to see a lot more of it. 

Carrie: Yeah.  Another thing I like about that is that it’s more about solving problems.  Understanding root causes and solving problems, right?  So, the line that I try to scratch out of every script that I see, when I see it, is thanks for celebrating our 50th year.  We’re here to prepare for our next 50 years, right?  And that’s a hard message to hear when it’s a social service organization.  When should they be there in 50 years?  Shouldn’t they be trying to think about what life could look like in 50 years. 

Rebecca: When this problem is solved. 

Carrie: When the problem is solved.  So, that’s the thing I’m not a big fan of. 

Rebecca: Okay.  So, the goal is to put these non-profits out of business because they’ve solved these problems, that’s right? 

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Carrie: Or to see the non-profits evolve, right?  There’s always going to be needs, there’s always going to be supports.  But if we continue to think about the supports of the social service sector as the helpers, we will see the same exact issues we see today, 50 years from now. 

Rebecca: Right.  We will stagnant around the same things. 

Carrie: Yeah. 

Rebecca: Well, Carrie, as always, I love chatting with you, and I could go on for days and hours and all the rest, as we often have.  Definitely going to bring you back, I think there’s lots of nuggets out of this conversation that we can draw on and do some more episodes.  But once again, thank you, thank you, thank you, love having you, and congratulations on all of your success and another female business owner looking across from you and this is your second iteration, we are proud of you, we are thankful for you, and grateful for you, so thank you. 

Carrie: Thank you. Thanks Rebecca. 

Rebecca: I hope everyone enjoyed today’s conversation with Carrie Fox.  Communications expert, again I thought some of those nuggets that she talked about as it relates to communication strategy and how you actually leverage a strategic confirms on behalf of your event.  As organizers I thought it was just really, really interesting.  And then, some of the ideas and examples that she gave, I thought really compelling also. 

So, as always if you have more questions for Carrie or me on this subject or anything related that you want answered in an upcoming session, please

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email me at rebecca@eventceo.com, and make sure to follow us on social media, all of the links are on our website at eventceo.com and linderglobal.com.  

As I always tell you, get your event friends and colleagues, tell them about us, have them subscribe and follow us on social media for updates and news and the latest episode releases. 

As always, I thank you for listening.  And until next time, make your days great. 

 

 

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