Case Study · 05
Institutional Transition
A three-year change management communications effort during a 300-member organization's decision to leave its denomination of seventy years. I designed and led the communications strategy, facilitated community engagement, and authored the materials that structured the process from deliberation through departure.
The Situation
The organization's denomination made a binding policy decision that placed the organization in an untenable position. The governing board needed to decide whether to remain, and if not, how to leave and where to go. The stakes were existential: the decision would affect the organization's identity, legal structure, financial health, and relationship with its members for decades.
This wasn't a rebrand or a product launch. It was an institutional crisis that required sustained, careful communications work over three years. Every message carried risk. The wrong framing could fracture the community. Silence would be worse.
The Communications Strategy
Four phases, three years
1 · Information
Controlled release cadence, executive ghostwriting in three distinct voices, coordinated board messaging
2 · Engagement
Three town halls built on research instruments—surveys, facilitated small groups, large-group deliberation
3 · Decision support
The Three Futures Framework: even-handed comparative analysis for the governing board
4 · Transition
Departure communications coordinated with legal counsel under high-pressure, time-sensitive conditions
Information and Deliberation
Before the organization could make a decision, the community needed to understand the landscape. I coordinated messaging with the governing board to ensure official communications were accurate, measured, and released on a controlled timeline. I drafted leadership statements and organizational letters—writing in the voice of three principals with distinct communication styles—and managed the cadence of announcements to prevent information overload.
Community Engagement
I co-designed and led a series of three town halls that served as structured feedback mechanisms for the community. Each was built on a specific research instrument: surveys, facilitated small-group discussion, and large-group deliberation. Across the series, I gathered data from 103 participants and authored summary reports that translated community sentiment into actionable findings for the governing board.
The Town Hall Summary Reports are among the strongest examples of my analytical writing. They take qualitative community input—open-ended responses, discussion notes, emotional testimony—and organize it into structured findings with clear implications for leadership decision-making.
Decision Support
As the board moved toward decision, I authored the Three Futures Framework—a comparative analysis of the organization's viable paths forward that equipped the governing board to navigate the decision with structured, even-handed information rather than instinct or faction.
Transition Communications
Once the decision was made, I managed the communications around departure: drafting announcements, coordinating timing with legal counsel and senior leadership, and maintaining message discipline under high-pressure conditions. Several of these communications were time-sensitive and involved reputational considerations that required precise language and careful review chains.
A community of 300 people making a once-in-a-generation decision is as high-stakes as communications work gets. The margin for error was zero, and the process held.
What This Demonstrates
This is change management communications in the most direct sense. It involved every skill that defines the discipline: stakeholder mapping, message sequencing, executive ghostwriting, community engagement design, research instrument development, data synthesis, and crisis-adjacent communications under time pressure.
The scale was smaller than a Fortune 500 reorganization. The complexity was not.
Town Hall Summary Reports available on request, redacted as appropriate.