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Business Communicators Summit: Reconnect!

  • KU Edwards Campus - BEST Conference Center 12600 Quivira Road Overland Park, KS, 66213 United States (map)

KC IABC’s annual Business Communicators Summit is back in person!

It’s time to Reconnect! with others and invest in your professional development with presentations from top communications and marketing leaders in Kansas City. We are delighted to have Lori Wiles as our emcee for the day.

Schedule

Lori Wiles

Lori Wiles, Vice President of Marketing for GEHA, is a marketing and brand growth executive leader who has worked with some of the largest brands in Kansas City with national markets, including Cerner, Sprint, Lockton Benefits Group, and Blue Cross Blue Shield KC. She seeks out opportunities to challenge people, teams and companies to be their best and build brands that stand apart.

Leading Culture: A Communications Opportunity for 2023

As communicators, we help organizations become better places to work where people can exchange clarity for confusion and confidence for uncertainty. Every day we strengthen how leaders become more aware of what people bring and need, how leaders edit their behavior so people feel free to be and do their best and how communication ensures every voice is heard. Mark will discuss how organizations can stand in and move beyond their culture truth to become workplaces where people feel free to say “no”, managers no longer respond with, “this is how we have always done it” and sounds of celebration boom above conversations filled with fear. Because we can make our world a better place, one organization at a time.

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RU Ready for What’s Ahead?

Kansas City is set to gain major visibility from:

  • NFL Draft 2023

  • KC Current: First Women’s Soccer Stadium in 2024

  • FIFA World Cup 2026

This isn’t just about sports, these organizations or even Kansas City. These events will bring people together and shine a spotlight on our community. This matter to your clients, consumers and employees. How can your business or nonprofit celebrate Kansas City’s success and benefit from our worldwide exposure? How can you create a strategy to capitalize on these events in an authentic and appropriate way? Our Power Panel will discuss sponsorships, media relations, employee communications and more so you can be ready when the international spotlight hits our city. 

Power Panelists

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Session Presenters

Creating Authentic Voices

Brooke Estelle

Brooke Estell is a multidisciplinary creative and entrepreneur from the Midwest. As a Senior Copywriter at Conscious Minds Studios, her creative work focuses on bringing the stories of Black and Indigenous women of color to life through projects such as Nike’s Come Thru and Do More You and Nike x JD Sports’ Makers Campaign.

Focus
An exploration of the power of authentic, compelling storytelling through the lens of BIPOC Gen Zers; a generation poised to become the most pivotal generation to the future of retail, media and beyond. We’ll look at case studies where real storytelling, not ads, has proven to change the tide when it comes to reaching Gen Z audiences.

AI and Marketing Communications

Dan Barker

Dan Barker is the CEO and Founder of DataBig.AI, a company that leverages artificial intelligence to uncover hidden revenue opportunities within clients' CRM and enables companies to CARPE OMNIA (seize it all). Read more about Dan.

Focus
Explore how embracing artificial intelligence (AI) can help align sales and marketing efforts and uncover hidden revenue opportunities. We will discuss the benefits of using AI to personalize the customer experience, optimize sales processes, and improve lead generation and qualification.

Wins and Lessons Learned from 25 years in Strategic Communications Leadership

Eric Morgenstern

As Founder and CEO of Morningstar Communications, Eric provides a wide range of services for his clients, including strategic communications, executive coaching, presentation coaching, crisis communications and more. More about Eric.

Focus
Eric Morgenstern has learned a thing or two in his 25 years as CEO of Morningstar Communications. The communications world has changed over the last few decades, but the keys to success have not. Eric shares his “25 pearls of wisdom” learned along the way that you can benefit from, whether it's strategic or crisis communications, leadership, or executive coaching. Wherever you are in your communications/marketing career, this session will have something for everyone. 

Five Tips for Networking Success: The Coffee Lunch Coffee Approach

Alana Muller

Alana Muller is founder and CEO of Coffee Lunch Coffee where she is a speaker, strategist, workshop facilitator, coach and an internationally bestselling author of Coffee Lunch Coffee: A Practical Field Guide for Master Networking, the anthology Growth – Deconstructing GRIT Collection, and a blog, CoffeeLunchCoffee.com. Through her work, she has helped thousands of people formulate a strategic mindset around networking. Learn more about Alana.

Focus
While at times, networking may feel intimidating, stressful or awkward, now is the time to sharpen your networking skills, utilize this powerful tool and connect with others. Alana Muller will share an overview of her concept, Coffee Lunch Coffee – an accessible, relevant, immediately actionable approach to professional networking for those interested in connecting with others, getting involved in their community, seeking to advance their career or looking to build social relationships.

What Companies Are Getting Wrong About Building Brands and Organizational Trust

Brand and trust need to go hand in hand. What makes people more loyal to brands? What behaviors do consumers exhibit towards brands they trust the most? And how does a company address the trust gap in their brand? Kurt Bartolich, Founder of Brand Certain, a brand positioning and research firm, and Cory Scheer,  Founder of TrustCentric Consulting, share the results of their national survey on Brand and Trust.    

Getting to Know You: Networking at a Deeper Level for More Meaningful Connections

We all know that most of our opportunities come from our connections and that being in conversation with others is a path to find both business and personal fulfillment. But what are the best ways to do that in 2023? What works now and how can we integrate networking into our overly busy lives? Especially if you feel your network has atrophied through the pandemic, come jump-start your energy and ideas for making new connections and refreshing existing ones. You will gain some new strategies and have some IRL practice in this lively session.

Alana Muller, an entrepreneurial executive leader whose primary focus is to connect, inspire and empower community, is Founder and CEO of Coffee Lunch Coffee. She is a networking speaker, workshop facilitator, coach, and an internationally bestselling author of Coffee Lunch Coffee: A Practical Field Guide for Master Networking, the anthology Growth – Deconstructing GRIT Collection, and a blog, CoffeeLunchCoffee.com. 

Kathryn Lorenzen is a career and professional development coach, and a former KC IABC board member. Formerly a partner at LandaJob, a recruiting firm in marketing communications, she has coached over 300 people through career transitions and career advancement, largely through the power of making connections. She is also a partner in Your Right Livelihood (yourrightlivelihood.com), a course and group experience to help people discover the work they love.

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A "No Fail" Process for Successful Conflict Resolution

Jeannette Terry

Jeannette is an accomplished Organizational Development consultant with a 30 year track record of supporting clients across five continents. Learn more about her here.

Focus
As a leader, a key responsibility is to see that potentially disruptive conflicts are addressed within your group or across groups or individuals early and resolved successfully. Experience shows that conflicts between individuals or teams over substantive issues accompanied by strong emotions, inflexible positions, and poor listening rarely resolve  themselves. Instead, they either continue to escalate or go underground, only to be refought later over the same issues or a new potentially polarizing issue. In this session you will learn how to resolve conflicts for a win-win outcome for all involved. 

Transforming the Truman Presidential Library: PR Planning When Life Has Other Plans

Dean Davison

Dean Davison is the founder of Davison Strategic Communications, a Kansas City-based firm that works with financial services and non-profit clients around the world on brand, culture and reputation issues.

Focus
Step inside the remarkable story of the newly transformed Truman Presidential Library & Museum in Independence. You will learn how the Truman leadership team overcame a series of challenges to open “the new benchmark for Presidential Libraries.” You will take away four important lessons from the re-launch, plus an understanding of how both luck and resilience played a critical role in sharing the Library’s story with millions of people.

Attention is the New Currency: How to Leverage Your Personal Brand to Grow Your Business

Aaron Fulk

In 2016, as a single mom without a college degree, Aaron (spelled like a boy) founded Lillian James Creative in her garage. She leaned on her marketing and sales experience and tapped into her personal and professional networks to grow a multi-million dollar marketing business and a strong national brand.

Focus
Learn how to determine what types of content will draw the most attention to your business to grow revenue, how to lean into your personal brand with confidence in a crowded virtual world, and identify the different types of content platforms you can take advantage of to draw attention to your business. 

Creating a Customer Experience Success Plan

Sheri Johnson

As Chief Marketing Officer for McCownGordon, Sheri leads the firm’s marketing and brand strategy. She oversees a team focused on brand building, corporate marketing, vertical market initiatives, sales support, internal communications and customer experience. Read more about Sheri.

Focus
Customer experience is a powerful accelerant for business growth. Businesses that get it right see stronger customer loyalty and outperform their competitors in both revenue and profit. Learn how McCownGordon has grown a B2B CX program from the ground up and has empowered our team to deliver on promises for clients. Sheri will walk attendees through how McCownGordon identified the opportunity and was able to implement a customer experience program, as well as use the feedback from the program to create immediate changes to better our customer interactions and relationships.

Earlier Event: February 14
Coffee Chat: Join Us for Caffeine, Networking and Insights
Later Event: March 23
Words That Matter: A Guidebook for the Modern Lexicon