Let's Go

After thirty years in communications and a lifetime of opinions on absolutely everything, I’m surprised I haven’t written a blog before. But here it is.

This blog will help you save historic places using smart communications. Exactly how you’ll do that depends.

Nonprofits need to raise money, engage supporters, and mobilize action. Businesses need to market their services, build consensus, and communicate their work clearly. Government agencies need to educate, inform, and involve community members.

Regardless of your role, if your work involves other people, you need to inform, engage, and persuade them in one way or another.

I can help by sharing practical tips you can use right now and general principles that will serve you well into the future. I’ll also express some thoughts on larger issues in heritage conservation.

Now that major change is being forced upon us, how can we use this window of opportunity to advance the field? Some changes we’ve been talking about for years; others we haven’t even thought of yet.

My dreams include:

• Helping you weather the perfect storm of COVID, recession, and our long overdue reckoning with structural racism

• Bringing preservation communicators (accidental or otherwise) together to compare notes, commiserate, and know you’re not alone

• Creating messaging based on the science of how people actually think and behave, not assumptions and anecdotes

• Changing the narrative of heritage conservation from elitist and obstructionist to inclusive, productive, and essential

But what about you? What are your dreams for how we save, celebrate, and revitalize historic places? And back on earth, what questions do you have about marketing, messaging, and engagement?

Please let me know in the comments. If you’re going to give me five minutes, I want to make it worth your while.

I look forward to hearing from you, learning from you, and helping you however I can.

If we play it right, we can come out of this crisis even stronger than before.