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Selecting my favorite comments from the most recent Common Sense Colloquy Q&As is both challenging and fun. I’m always struck by how relevant the comments from our participants are, and how much they have in common with each other. Listening, engaging others and simplifying what you say and how you say it come up as advice again and again. But what makes the series so interesting to me are the other nuggets of wisdom that may be specific, funny and/or inspiring.   The past

After nearly six years, I’m still surprised by how useful the insights shared by our Common Sense Colloquy participants are for my daily work. The inspiration and information each participant imparts is both helpful and encouraging and reminds me of what a great resource this series is for communicators.   This is my second post in our Years Five and Six in Review series and it includes responses from our sixteen participants about the best advice each participant has given

Somehow, nearly six years have passed since I started The Common Sense Colloquy series of Q&As with energy, environment and other leaders in February 2018. In that time, more than sixty leaders from a variety of backgrounds and organizations have shared their insights on common sense communications and the wisdom of their professional experience. It’s a remarkable collection of commentaries from an inspiring set of people and a reminder that common sense is a useful foundati

While we’re often recognized for our work on energy and environmental issues, our work on equity is equally important to us. So we were thrilled when one of our The Change Agencies partners, Bernadette Davis of BDC Strategy Group , suggested a collaboration on behalf of Reaching Out MBA (ROMBA) . ROMBA is the “biggest and best known organization focused on supporting the LGBTQ+ MBA Community.” ROMBA was looking for help on communications strategy and messaging. We worked toge

In January 2022, we celebrated our seventh anniversary in business by announcing the launch of the RENEW PR LGBTQIA Endowed Scholarship at the Texas Tech Alumni Association. The annual scholarship provides funding for an LGBTQIA student in the college of Arts and Sciences or any LGBTQIA student in a college at Texas Tech who plans to study abroad. And last month, we celebrated the first recipient of this scholarship (from last year): Doan Tran . The idea behind this schol

When people ask me about the work I do, I explain that RENEW PR is focused on energy, environment and equity and most of our work is in the public affairs arena, meaning policy and regulation and similar topics. The work this month’s guest does addresses many of these issues so it makes sense that we’d include him in the Common Sense Colloquy . Rob Gramlich is Founder and President of Grid Strategies, LLC and a frequent commenter on energy and decarbonization policy onlin

Earlier this year, I had the pleasure and privilege of being interviewed by renowned Professional Certified Coach Ken Jacobs for his monthly column in PRSA's Strategies and Tactics newspaper on my "commitment to DEI." Strategies & Tactics editor John Elsasser kindly granted me permission to reprint the Q&A in its entirety from the June-July 2023 issue of the newspaper. My thanks to John for his permission and to Ken for this terrific conversation. Ben Finzel's Commitment t

Last year, we celebrated our seventh anniversary in business by announcing the debut of the RENEW PR LGBTQIA Endowed Scholarship at the Texas Tech Alumni Association for LGBTQIA students at Texas Tech University. We decided to honor our “seven years of good luck” by giving back to help others. The annual scholarship provides funding for an LGBTQIA student in the college of Arts and Sciences or any LGBTQIA student in a college at Texas Tech who plans to study abroad. As we

Pride Month is a great time to introduce you to another inspiring LGBTQ leader. Elena Joy Thurston is the CEO of the Pride & Joy Foundation . In this role, her mission is, “to prevent suicide and homelessness in the LGBTQ+ community by fostering allyship, empowering advocates, and creating opportunities for LGBTQ+ visibility.” The Pride & Joy Foundation is small (for now), but mighty. They provide virtual programming focused on preparing LGBTQ+ people for leadership and engag

Our work on energy, environment and equity public affairs provides opportunities to work and collaborate with a number of organizations and advocates leading the way on these issues. One of those organizations is The Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES) . In fact, this is the second time we’ve featured C2ES in this series: we interviewed former C2ES President Bob Perciasepe in July of 2018 . This month, I’m happy to feature C2ES’s current leader, Dr. Nathaniel Keoh

This weekend, I had the pleasure and privilege of delivering the 2023 Texas Tech University Lavender Graduation Speech . I'm an alumnus of Texas Tech University (B.A. History, 1989) and this was my first trip back to Texas Tech since graduating nearly 34 years ago! As I've written here in the past , my Texas Tech education, life in Texas and study abroad experience helped make me who I am today. So I was particularly excited to have an opportunity to share that story with thi

As the holder of a degree in history, I understand the importance of remembering, assessing and honoring the past while ensuring that we learn lessons from it as well. That’s exactly what the Museum of Public Relations does. So, it only makes sense that I would feature the Museum’s Founder, President and CEO in this series. It’s a pleasure to welcome Shelley Spector to the Common Sense Colloquy . And what better time to feature Shelley Spector than during Women’s History Mon

"Restoring common sense to communications" often means finding the simplest way to talk about something complex or challenging. Finding a way to make the difficult discernable is the essence of clear, compelling, effective communications. Our new client the Renewable Thermal Collaborative (RTC) fits this narrative well and we’re happy to have Blaine Collison , the Executive Director of the RTC, as this month’s guest for the Common Sense Colloquy . So, what is renewable therm

We’ve had the pleasure and privilege of working with a number of leading environmental and conservation organizations over the past eight years. We’ve included them in this series whenever possible, and we’re happy to add to that list this month with a new Q&A with Brian Sybert , the executive director of the Conservation Lands Foundation (CLF). Brian leads an organization that is focused more on “doing the work” than on “taking the credit,” but that doesn’t mean their work

Every January brings us more than just a celebration of a new calendar year: at RENEW PR , it’s also the start of another year in business. We opened for business on January 23, 2015 , so today is the eighth anniversary of our launch. It’s been an incredible eight years: we’ve worked with more than 40 clients , helped secure several important changes in federal law, promoted new cleantech policies and even won an award in the process. Over these eight years, we’ve sharpened

We don’t talk as much about our work on equity in this series as we should so we’re addressing that omission. One way is to highlight the work of our colleagues and business partners in The Change Agencies , the national network of multicultural and LGBTQ owned and operated public relations agencies we helped launch in June of 2019. This month, we’re shining a spotlight on the agency leaders we have the pleasure and privilege of collaborating with to run The Change Agencies:

Although our work is generally focused in the United States, we are beginning to have opportunities to bring our expertise in communicating about energy to clients working in other parts of the world. One of the first such clients is Greenwood Energy , a part of The Libra Group , and a partner firm to our client Greenwood Sustainable Infrastructure (GSI). [To learn more about GSI, read our Common Sense Colloquy Q&A with their CEO, Mazen Turk, from earlier this year here .] G

With so much happening in the energy and environment communities this year, it can be challenging to determine what to focus on for this monthly series of interviews. One topic of particular interest to many of our audiences is sustainability and corporate responsibility. I’ve been encouraged to see the importance of these issues increase over the past few decades to the point where they are now front and center in the national conversation and key drivers of business and pol

With a name like RENEW PR , we are often viewed as a renewable energy-only PR firm. We aren’t, but renewables and sustainability are an important part of our work and a key area of interest and focus (particularly since we’ve worked on numerous wind and solar campaigns and client projects). So we were thrilled when our friends at The Libra Group re-introduced us to Greenwood Sustainable Infrastructure (GSI), a company we had worked with previously. GSI is led by Chief Execu

Equity is one of the three areas of focus for RENEW PR (along with energy and environment). We define the term as meaning that “everyone has the opportunities, resources and support they need to participate fully in society.” For us, that seems like common sense – and it is, or it should be. Equity is often considered along with diversity, inclusion and other concepts as part of a broader conversation about the actions necessary to ensure full engagement of everyone in socie

We've now completed a whirlwind Pride Month 2022. It was a month filled with highs and lows, like any month in the past few years, frankly. What was different this year was the sense that, as the Museum of Public Relations said in their annual Pride event title this year, LGBTQ rights are on the line . That sense was reinforced on June 24th, when the Supreme Court announced their ruling in the Dobbs case, declaring that women no longer had control over their own reproductive