Lori Bower - BowerComm, 210 E 30th Avenue, Hutchinson, KS (2026)

10/17/2026

“That looks like a salad spinner.” Why, yes. Yes it is.

That's what a vendor I've gotten to know over the years at the National Conference for Growing Community Foundations said to me this week in Wichita, as I was packing up and hauling it out to my car.

It had been sitting unused in a drawer for ten years before I pulled it out to collect business cards at our booth (a giveaway for a free seat in our Awareness Engine Boot Camp this November).

I didn't have to make a last-minute trip to Dollar Tree for a new bowl. Turns out the inside bowl of a salad spinner is the green in our brand colors, and it had been sitting right there in the drawer the whole time.

That's how most organizations' best stories work too. Somewhere in your files, or a board member's memory, there's a donor story or an impact story that fits exactly what you're trying to say right now. Nobody's pulled it out in years, so it doesn't even register as useful anymore. It just reads as old.

But old isn't the same as used up. Most people who'd hear it haven't heard it at all, because it's been sitting in a drawer since the last time anyone needed it.

You might not need to scramble for a new story. Try checking the drawer.

10/11/2026

In the past few weeks, I've done Board Ambassador Workshops with two community foundations. One was virtual, with Otsego Community Foundation in Michigan, and one was in person with the Community Foundation of the Fox River Valley in Illinois.

Between the two, there were more than two dozen board members in the room or on Zoom, each with their own network of business owners, attorneys, financial advisors, nonprofit leaders, neighbors and friends. Their circles add up to lot of people who could be hearing about the foundation, and I think most community foundations are only tapping a small part of it.

Board members are already out having conversations where the foundation could naturally come up. The problem is that “be an ambassador” is a pretty vague assignment. A lot of board members hold back because they're worried someone will ask about fees or the difference between fund types, and they'll look like they don't know their own foundation. So they don't bring it up at all.

We spent a good part of both workshops making the assignment more practical.
We talked about the board member's role as a bridge between people in the community and foundation staff. They don't need to remember every fund type or answer questions about fees. They need to know enough to recognize when the foundation might be useful, share an example that helps the person understand what's possible and then connect them with staff.

You could see that was a relief for some of them. They didn't have to become mini foundation executives. They just needed to pay attention, know a few good stories and be willing to make an introduction.

And there were plenty of stories already sitting in the room. At Otsego, board members talked about funding fourth-grade swim lessons, a fishing club that grew with foundation support and a family whose experience eventually led to a fund for free ultrasounds for expecting mothers.

At Fox River Valley, we heard about a business owner who uses the community foundation to handle the steady stream of donation and sponsorship requests he gets. Another had a conversation at the gym that eventually led to a grant for a local organization. Staff shared how a conversation with a financial advisor led to an introduction, then more conversations and eventually a $1 million gift.

Those examples are a lot easier to remember and repeat than a list of fund types. They also make it easier for board members to recognize when something similar comes up in their own conversations.

There are smaller ways to help, too. One board member said she'd happily invite people to her house, put out w**e and cheese, have foundation staff over and let them do the talking. Others were comfortable introducing staff to their financial advisors, sharing a foundation post, bringing someone along to an event or wearing their foundation name tag when they're out in the community.

None of this is especially complicated, but across a whole board it adds up. Otsego has 14 board members. If each one has one more conversation about the foundation each month, that's 168 conversations a year. Fox River Valley has 17, so that's 204. Most of those won't go anywhere, and that's fine. It only takes one of them turning into the kind of introduction that leads to a $1 million gift.

09/14/2026

BowerComm has handled the marketing for the Kansas State Fair since 2018, which means every September we have a remote office in my brother’s Winnebago, parked in the fairgrounds RV park.

My kids think the RV at the fair is, hands-down, the greatest perk of my job.

So on Saturday night, I chaperoned a posse of four sixth-grade boys spending the night.

If you have ever tried to herd four sixth-grade boys at a state fair or amusement park, you already know where this is going.

They wanted to ride the wildest rides. They wanted to spend all their money on carnival games that resulted in stuffed snakes and other things no household has ever actually needed. They wanted slushies. They wanted to mess with every button, switch and gadget in the RV. They wanted to stay up much later than I wanted them to stay up.

And on the drive home the next morning, my own sixth grader decided it would be hilarious to take over the sound system and start looking for songs with words he knew I wouldn’t appreciate. (That is how I learned there's a man on Spotify who has written a p**p song for nearly every human name.)

The whole experience reminded me of that old EDS/Hewlett Packard Super Bowl commercial about herding cats.

Getting everybody back to the RV when they were supposed to be there, getting them to stop spending money on stupid carnival games, getting them to go to sleep and then getting them packed up again the next morning required more strategy than I had given the assignment credit for.

Years ago, I had a completely different cat-herding assignment at the same fair. It involved making a plan for a group of five women, all over 70, to spend the day there.

That was a different operation altogether.

Their challenges weren’t staying off carnival rides or blowing $30 trying to win a stuffed snake. We were thinking about mobility. Rest stops. How far one exhibit was from another. What we needed to see before everyone got tired. Where we needed to be and at what time.

Same Kansas State Fair. Completely different plan.

If I wanted my sixth grader to spend an hour looking at quilts, it would not happen through a PSA on why quilts are historically significant and beautifully made.

And if I wanted my 80-plus-year-old aunt on the Ring of Fire, it would not come from a $25 “all you can ride” wristband promotion.

I could communicate both of those messages perfectly well. I could make a beautiful ad, put money behind it, get it in front of exactly the right people and report back that thousands of people saw it.

None of that means I persuaded anybody to do anything.

I think we sometimes lose sight of that in communications. Communication itself is not the end game. The reason we communicate is because we want someone to do or believe something. We want them to attend, donate, volunteer, apply, enroll, buy, advocate, change a behavior or think differently about an issue. Whatever the action is, our job is to move them toward it.

Which means knowing who our audience is isn’t enough. We have to understand what might actually move them.

A lot of audience profiling never gets much further than demographics: women ages 35 to 65, donors, business owners, parents, the general public. Those descriptions can be useful, but they don’t tell us what we need to know to persuade someone. We need to know what they want, what they care about, what they are worried about, what they are likely to resist and what might make the action we’re asking them to take feel worth doing.

That is why clearly defining audiences is a key step in all of our work. We aren’t doing it to fill in an “audience” box on a planning worksheet. We’re trying to understand people well enough to develop communication that has a chance of persuading them.

With four sixth-grade boys, telling them it was time to go to sleep wasn’t enough. I had to understand what was keeping them awake, then block my son’s phone and turn off the lights. The words weren’t the strategy. Understanding what was driving their behavior was.

Think about one audience you’re trying to move right now. What do you actually want them to do? Why would they want to do it? Why might they not? What matters enough to them to get their attention?

If you can’t answer those questions, then writing more social posts, sending another email or buying another ad probably isn’t going to solve the problem. You don’t have a communication problem yet.

You have a purr-suasion problem.
(And yes, I am a cornydog.)

08/27/2026

Last month, I was in Wichita speaking to a room full of arts leaders at the Kansas Arts Network conference about The Awareness Gap.

As we worked through the four reasons good organizations can stay invisible, you could see the lightbulbs going off around the room. The problems people thought they had weren’t necessarily the culprits.

One person had a board that kept bringing her communication ideas and wanted a way to help them understand what good actually looks like. Another had several people communicating on behalf of the organization, but everyone was operating in a silo. Someone else had a board pushing for more Facebook posts — right after we’d looked at data showing how little of their potential audience an average organic post was actually reaching.

And several people zeroed in on the Communications Capacity Scorecard because it gave them something they hadn’t had before: language for describing where their communication was actually breaking down.

Instead of “we need to do a better job of marketing,” they could start identifying whether they had a clarity problem, an audience and relevance problem, a reinforcement and relationship problem, or an implementation capacity problem.

By the end, people were circling which category matched their own organization and jotting down what to fix first.

That’s exactly the kind of 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝘄𝗲’𝗿𝗲 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲–𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟳, including several that community foundations, private foundations, and associations can bring directly to their nonprofit partners and members.

𝗠𝗢𝗦𝗧 𝗥𝗘𝗤𝗨𝗘𝗦𝗧𝗘𝗗 𝗦𝗘𝗦𝗦𝗜𝗢𝗡𝗦 𝗥𝗜𝗚𝗛𝗧 𝗡𝗢𝗪

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗚𝗮𝗽: 𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗚𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁 𝗢𝗿𝗴𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘇𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗦𝘁𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗴𝗴𝗹𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗕𝗲 𝗦𝗲𝗲𝗻

This 60-minute session helps organization leaders diagnose four common reasons awareness stays low: the outcome is unclear, the audience is too broad, communication stays inside the echo chamber, or there is no real system behind the work.

Participants also use our Communications Capacity Scorecard to start identifying where their own gaps lie and what deserves their attention first.

For community foundations, private foundations, and associations, this works well as a learning session for grantees, nonprofit partners, or members at very different levels of communications sophistication — because everyone can diagnose their own organization and leave with a clearer next move.

𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗔𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗘𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗲
For foundations and associations that want to make a deeper investment in nonprofit communications capacity, Build Your Awareness Engine moves from diagnosis into implementation.

The experience begins with a half-day workshop, delivered in person or online, where nonprofit leaders work on their own organizations as they build a clearer, more repeatable approach to communication.

The workshop is followed by two one-hour virtual Launch Labs, giving participants a chance to put the work into practice, come back with questions and challenges, and get help moving their plans forward.

Rather than sending nonprofit leaders home from a workshop with a notebook full of good intentions, the format gives them some structure and support for actually getting started.

𝗔𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗕𝗼𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗮𝘀 𝗔𝗺𝗯𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗮𝗱𝗼𝗿𝘀
Board members usually want to help. The problem is that they aren’t always sure what to say or what useful communication support actually looks like.

This session gives nonprofit leaders practical ways to equip board members with the language, tools and confidence to talk about the organization clearly and naturally in the community.

𝗢𝗧𝗛𝗘𝗥 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲–𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟳 𝗟𝗘𝗔𝗥𝗡𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗧𝗢𝗣𝗜𝗖𝗦

𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗣𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗪𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲
How mission-driven organizations can communicate culture, purpose and identity in ways that attract aligned staff and volunteers.

𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗣𝗶𝗽𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲
How to move people from passive awareness into deeper engagement with programs, mission and opportunities.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗗𝗶𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲-𝗠𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗠𝗲𝘁𝗵𝗼𝗱
A 12-month storytelling system that helps organizations build awareness and trust by sharing two strategic stories each month.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗟𝗮𝗯
A hands-on session where participants turn one real organizational story into social, email, website and other useful content.

𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗕𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗙𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻
How audience profiles, brand archetypes and core messaging work together to shape a brand people understand, remember and trust.

Bailey Ramsey and I are booking these learning sessions and workshops for 2027, with a few dates still available in late 2026.

If you’re thinking about what kind of capacity-building or learning opportunities to offer your nonprofit partners or members next year, reply to this email. We can talk through what you’re trying to accomplish and which format would make the most sense.

08/21/2026

My 11-year-old picked our vacation this year, which is how I ended up on Icon of the Seas.

The ship is huge, and what fascinated me most was the operation behind it. They serve 15,000 meals a day, and for the most part, nobody seems to be waiting around for food.

One night in the main dining room, I ordered pecan-crusted salmon with garlic mashed potatoes and asparagus. On Latin night, I had jerk chicken and a Colombian take on crème brûlée. That was also the night they encouraged everyone to wear white, and somehow thousands of people actually did.

(I can’t get my own family to agree on matching pajamas for a Christmas card, but this ship got thousands of people into white on a Tuesday.)

Obviously none of that was figured out that afternoon. The menu, staffing, quantities, timing, service — all of it has been worked out months ahead of time, based on learnings from thousands of cruises over decades.

That same menu isn't just for one week. The next group of passengers gets on and they do it again. Then another group gets on and they do it again.

For the passengers, it’s a brand-new experience. For the crew, it’s a process.
That’s a pretty good comparison for communications work in a nonprofit.

You get a new donor. You need another story. Year-end comes around. The annual report is due. An event needs promoted. None of those things are new, but a lot of teams still end up rebuilding them every time.

When I worked on a lawn and garden equipment business 20 years ago, we used to joke that they were surprised every year when the grass started growing.

The opportunity is to get more deliberate about what happens next time.
If you figured out a good donor follow-up, keep it. If you found a good way to collect stories, make that the way you collect stories. If last year’s campaign timeline worked, don’t make yourself recreate it from memory next year.

That doesn’t mean every donor gets the same message or every campaign looks the same. It just means you aren’t wasting time re-solving the same problems.

For a small team, that matters.

That’s a lot of the work we do with our clients — helping them figure out what needs to be thoughtful and custom, and what can become a repeatable process so they have more time for the things that actually require their attention.

The grass is going to grow again next spring. Year-end is going to show up again next December. And another boatload of people is going to get hungry next week.

Some things really can be planned for.

What’s something your team does over and over that still feels harder than it should?

____________________________________

**What if you could get a grant for communications?**

If your team needs more communications capacity, funding may be part of the answer. Watch our free webinar, How to Get a Grant for Communications Capacity, for practical ideas on making the case for communications support and pursuing funding to help pay for it.

-->Message me for a link

_____________________________________

**Put Communications in the 2027 Budget**

If becoming better known and valued is on your wish list for next year, now is the time to figure out what kind of help you actually need. That might be a few hours of consulting, a planning process, help executing a specific project or an outsourced communications partner.

We can help you sort through the options and figure out what makes sense for your goals, team and budget.

--> Message me to book a free discovery call

07/26/2026

Saturday morning was the pig show at our county 4-H fair. I sent my husband and the kids ahead at 6:30 while I finished packing the last of their other exhibits.

On the way to the fairgrounds, I realized I had time to stop for iced lattes for everyone. By the time I arrived, they were well into getting the pigs ready without me.

After eight years of hauling feed and washing pigs, I'd finally graduated to coffee duty.

My daughter's going into her sophomore year; my son is 11 and in his fourth year of 4-H. When they first started, they could do a job if you told them exactly what it was and stood right there while they did it. Fill this bucket. Wash this pig. Carry that feed over there. Spray them down, it's hot.

After a while, they could do those things without me hovering. Then they started remembering them on their own — the pigs need feed and water in the morning, there's a whole checklist before the show, and if it's hot, you cool them down before anybody has to say so.

My daughter's past that now. She's the one telling me what feed to buy because she's mixing it differently for pigs gaining at different rates. If we're going to be gone, she can hand my parents the whole plan and trust they'll follow it.

Pretty soon I'll be out of the pig business entirely. I'll just pay the bills and deliver the coffee.

There's a progression in there.
First you can do a task with help.
Then you can do it on your own.
Then you start seeing what needs doing before anyone tells you.
And eventually you can decide what matters most, tell other people what to do, and own how the whole thing turns out.

We take that progression for granted with kids. Nobody would hand my 11-year-old the entire pig operation, walk away, and check in once a week. That would be a bold management choice, likely resulting in a gadget-filled pig pen and a sw**e crime scene.

I see organizations do this with their communications staff.

They hire (or contract) someone who can write, or design, or shoot photos and video, or post on their social accounts. They expect that person to walk in and immediately know what the organization should be saying, what matters most, who needs to hear it, what can wait, and how all of it fits together.

Those aren't the same skill. Someone can be terrific at producing the work and still not have the experience to run the function. That gap is where the frustration starts.

After a couple months, the executive director thinks, “Why am I still deciding what needs to happen, filling in all the background, setting the priorities, and reviewing every draft? I hired someone to handle communications.” The employee thinks, “I'm doing exactly what I was asked. Why does everything keep getting rewritten?”

Sometimes it's the opposite problem. The employee has plenty of ideas and initiative but doesn't yet know the organization well enough to tell which ideas actually serve the bigger goal. So the director spends as much time steering the work as they'd have spent just doing it themselves. One person needs constant instruction, the other needs constant correction, and either way the director never gets promoted to coffee duty.

And it costs the organization more than a little frustration. While everyone waits for that person to catch up, communications are willy-nilly. The organization's program work stays every bit as good as it was. It just stays invisible.

At BowerComm we say it takes about two years for a new person to really hit their stride, and we warn them not to take a do-over too personally. They're producing good work well before then, but what takes longer is the judgment. It takes time to learn our clients and our standards, to know which questions to ask, to notice when something's off, and to hear what a client's really trying to accomplish even when they're not explaining it well.

I'm thankful that 10 of our 15 people have been with me more than five years. (It's the reason I can take an annual two-week vacation.) These days they're the ones telling ME what I should be doing. That kind of judgment takes years to build; you can't hand it to someone in their first week.

The tricky part is that organizations hire based on the level they can afford and expect the level they need.

The fix isn't to decide junior people are bad hires because you’re annoyed. It's to be honest about what level you actually hired and what support that person will need. Did you hire someone who can do specified communications tasks? Someone who can run familiar work without much hand-holding? Or someone with the experience and judgment to own the whole function? Those require very different levels of experience and judgment.

And sometimes the honest answer is that the level you need costs more than the budget currently holds. That's a fundable gap. Grantmakers are starting to treat communications capacity as exactly the kind of investment they'll back, whether you use it to hire up or bring in outside help.

None of this happens in a week. My kids and staff both needed years. But it happens — and when it does, you can finally set down the bucket and pick up the coffee.

07/17/2026

The frames for our Windom mural are painted and ready for the installer now. Not long ago, they were sitting unpainted in my livestock trailer, and I wasn't sure we'd make the deadline.

We got the grant last year — $4,000 from the Kansas Department of Commerce Kansas Arts Commission, an Arts Everywhere award. The goal was to have everything wrapped and reported by June 30th, when the state's fiscal year closed. Coordinating a school, a design, and a whole town just takes longer than that.

The mural itself came together fast, relative to everything else. Kaycee Sutter, our Little River-Windom school district art teacher and an outstanding muralist in her own right, sketched a couple of concepts, the Windom Community Fund advisory committee picked one, and the art classes painted the bulk of it this spring. Kaycee finished the details and weatherproofing herself in June.

Then our original plan for the frames fell through. Fab Works LLC bailed us out — owner Dylan Baldwin lives right here in the Windom community, and he built and donated every one of them. We would not be cutting a ribbon on July 27th without him.

Which left painting the frames themselves, on a deadline, with the installer waiting. I recruited an emergency crew: my 80-year-old dad, my uncle Dave (self-described as "older than dirt"), and my 11-year-old. Aunt Eileen mentioned Dave needed a project during their week visiting, and I did not let that opportunity pass me by.

They finished. What's left now is the installer setting the frames, the ribbon cutting, and getting the grant report to the state by July 31st.

Making the mural was only half the project, though. We also needed the frames fabricated and installed. And most importantly, we need a crowd for a PR photo.

Windom has about 90 people in it, no stoplight, no gas station, and most of who's left is older and already stretched thin. There's no natural crowd waiting around Main Street to walk up on a mural on its own. So a major question has been how to get people gathered to unveil it during a time when school is not in session.

So we picked July 27th. It's the night of Windom's monthly covered dish dinner — this month's theme is hot dogs, so everyone calls it hot dog night — and it happens to beat the deadline too. Windom calls itself the Covered Dish Capital, and one of the mural panels pays homage to that tradition. Hot dog night is the obvious time for it to happen.

There's no guarantee anyone turns out for a ribbon cutting on its own. But the covered dish dinner already pulls a crowd, every month, without fail. Our best shot at people being there is timing ours to land on theirs.

I see this also in client work. Plenty of organizations do the hard, real work of making something worth people's time — a program, a fix, a piece of art — and then invent an entirely new occasion to unveil it, instead of finding one that's already there. Nobody can guarantee a crowd. But you can improve your odds enormously by finding the night people already show up, and timing yours to land on it instead.

Ribbon cutting's July 27th, 6:30pm, at the Windom Community Center. Hot dogs, the whole town, and a mural. If you're anywhere near central Kansas that night, come hungry — I'd love to see you there.

Little River Activities/Athletics
Fab Works LLC: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61573969858724
McPherson County Community Foundation

07/02/2026

I was at The Wesley yesterday, and it took me straight back to my grandparents.

They were born in 1918 and 1920 and spent most of their lives half a mile from us as part of our farm operation, so I saw them most summer days in my childhood. July was the one month that gave us a little room to breathe, once planting and wheat harvest were both behind us (even though my own July was usually swallowed up by 4-H fair prep). Somewhere in the middle of that, we’d still find time to drive to Kansas City for a Royals game, usually timed around my grandfather’s birthday at the end of the month.

In the mid-2000s, they moved off that farm and into what was then Wesley Towers, a senior living community in Hutchinson (KS). It’s called The Wesley now. We handled their rebrand a couple years ago, and walking through their campus this week reminded me how we helped them avoid a mistake a lot of organizations make without realizing it.

The Wesley has been around since 1964, when it broke ground as The Methodist Home. Its first resident in 1969 was a woman named Bessie Good, who moved in at the age of 103. For decades after that, the organization was built for (and largely built by) a generation that grew up in the Dust Bowl and weathered the Depression. It looked and sounded the way that generation expected a senior living community to look and sound: steady, formal, a little reserved.

That’s not who’s walking through the door anymore. The residents The Wesley is recruiting today are more likely to be avid travelers who socialize through the Corvette Club. A name, a logo, and a palette of colors that made complete sense in 1964 (or even in 1999) doesn’t automatically make sense to someone retiring now, and pretending otherwise is how organizations end up talking past the very people they’re trying to reach.

The identity had slowly stopped matching the audience it needed to serve, and the rebrand was about catching it up. “Wesley Towers” became “The Wesley” – shorter and less institutional. But the work didn’t stop at the website and the letterhead, which is where a lot of rebrands run out of steam. It made its way into the wayfinding signage and the physical campus, so the people living there now, and the families touring as prospective residents, experience the new identity in the campus itself instead of just reading about it in a brochure.

The mark that came out of that work is a hummingbird, which isn’t exactly the expected choice for a senior living community. But it fits. Hummingbirds are quick and bright and a little restless, and that’s a far closer match to the actual energy of people planning to spend their retirement on a Harley than a quiet, institutional crest ever could have been.

I asked the CEO yesterday how residents had responded to the change, and he told me he hadn’t heard a complaint (lol). If you know this population and how firmly people can dig in over even small changes to routine or signage, that’s remarkable. It suggests the new identity felt like them, which is a much harder thing to pull off than most organizations realize going in.

Updating a logo file is easy enough. Walking every single touchpoint back through the new identity and asking whether it still holds up takes real, sustained work, and most organizations stop somewhere around the website makeover.

Finding this kind of gap early is an important piece of our Journey to Yes process. One of the first steps is a round of stakeholder interviews and audience profiles, because you can’t design an identity for people you’ve only guessed at. That’s how we found out who was actually walking through The Wesley’s door now, instead of assuming it was still the generation the building was originally built for.

My grandparents’ Wesley Towers and today’s The Wesley are serving the same mission with many of the same services and buildings. They’re not serving the same generation, though, and the brand had to catch up to that fact or risk spending years talking to people who’d already moved on without it.

If you’re looking at your own organization’s materials and client experience this week, ask yourself whether the person you actually need to walk through your door would recognize themselves in what you’re showing them.

Lori Bower - BowerComm

10/17/2026

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