Regan Douglass Transcript

Kirk Brown: Welcome to Let’s Hear It.

Eric Brown: Let’s Hear It is a podcast for and about the field of foundation and nonprofit communications produced by its two co-hosts, Eric Brown and Kirk Brown. No relation.

Kirk Brown: Well said, Eric. And I’m Kirk.

Eric Brown: And I’m Eric. Let’s Hear It is sponsored by the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, which enhances quality of life by championing the arts, promoting early childhood literacy and supporting research to cure chronic disease. Online at krfoundation.org. We are also sponsored by the Previs Foundation, a foundation creating an inclusive, equitable, and dynamic future for all San Diegans. Check out their amazingly good podcast Stop and Talk, hosted by Grant Oliphant and Crystal Page. You can find them at stopandtalkpodcast.com.

Kirk Brown: You can find Let’s Hear It on any podcast subscription platform.

Eric Brown: You can find us online at letshearicast.com.

Kirk Brown: And if you’d like the show, please, please, please rate us on Apple Podcasts so that more people can find us. Let’s get onto the show. So do you think we talk about courage enough?

Eric Brown: Courage.

Kirk Brown: Courage.

Eric Brown: What, what is this? Wizard of Oz?

Kirk Brown: Think about all of the courage that’s playing out across our field every day right now. Given what’s going on,

Eric Brown: there is,

Kirk Brown: and I think this conversation that we’re about to have is about courage as much as it’s about communications.

Eric Brown: Yeah. What an interesting and delightful bit of framing.

Kirk Brown: This is what I do for you. See, all of a sudden you’re like, and now I wanna have this conversation. See, you know, stick with me kid. You’ll have so much work to do.

Eric Brown: I just hope you’re taking your blood pressure meds.

Kirk Brown: This conversation is about courage. Courage,

Eric Brown: courage.

Kirk Brown: Set it up and then we’ll come back and I’ll go further.

Eric Brown: Okay. I spoke to my friend and colleague, Regan Douglass, who is the principal of Spark Wise Communications, a communications shop and consultancy. And I thought it was time for some news you can use.

Kirk Brown: Mm.

Eric Brown: By which I mean a lot of folks come to me asking, is it time to hang out a shingle? Should I start my own thing? Should I consult? And I have lots of thoughts. And so I thought it might be fun to have Regan come on, who two years ago hung out a shingle. She showed courage.

Kirk Brown: There you have it. See?

Eric Brown: And we had this great conversation about what it’s like to become a consultant.

Kirk Brown: And it seems that Regan is no worse for the wear. And having done that — which I’ve seen others track, following this path of leaving the big institutions, hanging out the shingle, and doing quite well — let’s call out Spark Wise Communications at sparkwisecommunications.com. And Regan Douglass is the principal and, I would argue, founding principal of Spark Wise Communications.

So this is Regan Douglass on Let’s Hear It. We’ll listen and we’ll come back.

Eric Brown: A lot of people who work in nonprofits or foundations get the tickle. They start asking themselves, what if I didn’t have to give or get performance reviews? What if I didn’t have to be in meetings to decide what snacks to serve to guests of my foundation?

What if I could just spend my time doing strategy or messaging or other actual work? What if I didn’t have to show my face at an office when I could be just as productive, if not more so, at home? What if I didn’t have to wear pants? What if I could take my skills and talents to lots of organizations and make an even bigger difference in the world?

What if I hung out a shingle and was my own boss? My guest today made that call. Regan Douglass spent years as a communications executive at PolicyLink, California Humanities, and the College Futures Foundation. Before launching Spark Wise Communications, her own consulting practice, she pulled the ripcord.

Now, I made the same leap over a decade ago, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made, but I also know it’s not for everyone. But today we’re trying to give you something useful, whether you’re seriously considering going independent or just letting the idea simmer. What does it actually take? What does it actually cost? And what does it feel like when the only name on the org chart is yours? Regan Douglass, my pal, my partner in crime. Welcome to Let’s Hear It.

Regan Douglass: Hi, Eric. It’s nice to see you. It’s always nice to see you. And yes, I made the jump. Love the ripcord reference. You are known for even crazier metaphors than that. I would just like to say, that’s one thing I’ve appreciated about you. But leaping into consulting has been fantastic. No regrets.

Eric Brown: Yes, I was a restrained metaphor assist in the cold open here. But you know, who knows where we’ll go. Actually, I may drop another fun metaphor on you later. Let’s just get started — how’d you get started in communications? Nobody does that on purpose.

Regan Douglass: Nobody does it on purpose. I think my earliest first calling actually was justice. I had a little justice heart. I wanted to right the wrongs in the world. Occasionally I wanted to tell people what to do. And I read a lot and I watched a lot of performances and I wrote a lot.

And I knew I wanted to be a writer. I loved the look on people’s faces in an audience when they were sort of spellbound by language. So those things kind of mashed together at some point, in the primordial soup. But I will say it was still somewhat accidental. I started working for PolicyLink. I was on their research and program team, and then I just absolutely fell in love with the communications.

It felt to me like that is where the magic sauce was. That was the place where, if you wanted to see major systemic change, major policy wins in the world, you needed to figure out who you were talking to and what you needed them to understand or do differently. And that happens in the communications shop, and it happens with communications partners.

So I suppose you could say I backed into it, but happily.

Eric Brown: And then, so you’re at PolicyLink and then you went to California Humanities. What’d you do there?

Regan Douglass: I went to California Humanities by way of a graduate school writing program. I was going back and forth between being a journalist and going into a writing program for grad school. Things have been a little crazy for journalists these last few years. Oh really? I have no idea. These last 15 years. I don’t know if you’ve read that in the news, but it’s been a little bit nuts — so there’s no news to

Eric Brown: read. Maybe it’s because of the dearth of journalists.

Regan Douglass: I went to California Humanities, and the storytelling there — at that time, a lot of our programming was around engaging a broad swath of the public in conversations about who do we want to be, who are we now, and what are we learning from our history? So, post-9/11, major rise in anti-Arab American and anti-Muslim sentiment and hate crimes. Having public conversations about: is this who we are? Is this who we wanna be? Does this remind us of some places we’ve been in the past, with Japanese American internment? What can we learn from that?

Those conversations I felt were really, really important. And it gave me some great insight into an organization that was kind of a combination of public and private — that did some grantmaking, ran some of their own programs, had a relationship with the government, but had their own board and their own way of working. So it was a great sort of tasting menu of a lot of the things that are available in the social sector.

Eric Brown: And then you went to College Futures Foundation. You were the head of communications there and you were digging down deep on education in California. What was that like? What was your job like?

Regan Douglass: That job evolved a lot over time. When I first came in, they were moving into a place where they were going to be developing a policy agenda. They were going to be doing major change across the state around higher ed economic opportunity for students, and I just wanted to be a part of that. I thought it sounded so exciting. And we had some really interesting leadership changes while I was there, and it felt like a really great opportunity to build out their communications team and function and skills across the organization.

I got really lucky with some fantastic colleagues — some policy colleagues and some program colleagues who were really hungry for partnership. Sometimes, you know, I think you have to do a tremendous amount of trust building until you can actually do projects together. But we did a little bit of that, and I mostly got pretty lucky with what I walked into.

And then I also had the opportunity — in addition to doing organization-wide communications and executive communications — to help provide some assistance to some of our grantees through trainings, and to building up our first ever news media investment portfolio. So we were funding news outlets, we were funding documentary filmmakers.

And it was a really great opportunity to say, hey, if what we wanna see is these changes around this topic, it’s going to be virtually impossible to do that without educating a much broader swath of the public on what the ins and outs of these higher ed issues are. It was not something that was covered by most newspapers. If any newspapers had an education reporter, they were focused on K-12. So just a tremendous amount of coverage needed. And I think I worked with you on some of that too, Eric, and learned a lot from other folks that had been investing in journalism.

Eric Brown: Yes, it’s quite possible. So okay. That all sounds great. And yet,

Regan Douglass: and yet,

Eric Brown: here you are.

Regan Douglass: Here I am.

Eric Brown: On your own.

Regan Douglass: On my own.

Eric Brown: What was the thing that inspired you to go out on your own?

Regan Douglass: I think the biggest thing was — I mean, you just named a few of my jobs. I’ve had something like 20 different jobs in my career so far. It used to be a joke at College Futures. Whenever we had outside folks come in and talk about our previous work, folks would just say, okay, Regan, what’s the weirdest job you’ve ever had?

And I could inevitably name three or four or five examples. But having worked inside a foundation for over 10 years, at a nonprofit, at a research and advocacy public policy think tank — I worked for a city and regional government, I worked in internal comms for a multinational corporation, I’ve been in the classroom — and then on down and out and up and weirder and weirder, I think across all of these sectors I’ve always seen this common thread: there tends to be a focus on communications activity and not strategy. And so, you know, that’s less about frustration with wearing pants to the office.

And I do, I do miss the snacks, I will say.

Eric Brown: Yeah.

Regan Douglass: The performance reviews nobody loves, although there are ways to make them a little bit more entertaining and useful. But strategic communications is such a special — just a jet fuel that can get you further faster with the work you’re trying to do.

And the thing that was making me beat my head against the wall was seeing how many different organizations were sort of picking from a menu of different activities without a clear plan for what was the change they wanted to see in the world, and with which audiences. And how do you focus your resources, your activities, your choices to get you that outcome?

And it sounds so simple, but it’s really kind of challenging. And communications tends to be one of those things that a lot of folks think they can do because we’re all talking to each other and we’re all reading and writing and consuming media and telling stories and all of those things. And of course we all can, but coming up with a really clear and fantastic strategy — that works, that helps us say yes to some things and no to many, many other things — that’s the hard part.

And that’s where it’s really useful having a partner. I mean, you were saying, what’s it like being out on your own? I am and I’m not. I am — I’ve got my shop — but I am partnering with lots of different folks who want a fresh pair of eyes and somebody to help them be more strategic. And I don’t mean strategic in the sense of this is going to be really expensive and you can never implement it. I mean strategic in the sense of focused. We know it’s gonna get you where you need to go, and it’s actually something that you can do on your own or with a little bit of help. I’m all about the solutions that actually live and work in the real world. Otherwise, what on earth is the point?

Eric Brown: Well, I think there are probably a lot of people who are there with you thinking, ooh, I might be able to have the opportunity to help organizations actually do strategy, for example. And yet you’re still in your job. You can hear me and you know who you are — still in your job. What, was there something in particular, or was there some kind of flash of inspiration? You know, you’d been sitting on this egg for a long time. How do you get it to hatch?

Regan Douglass: You sound like the pied piper of consulting. Are you trying to draw people to the dark side?

Eric Brown: There are 10 people gonna send me their mortgage statement.

Regan Douglass: Well, I think one of the things that holds people back is the idea of what stability is and looks like, and whether or not knowing exactly what to a certain extent each month is gonna hold financially in terms of your responsibilities, et cetera. And I am hardwired to enjoy change. I think that might be a little odd, but I like different projects, different challenges. I like growing and learning. And I don’t like doing the same thing all the time, and I don’t mind sort of weathering the ebbs and flows. I guess that’s the tolerance question: can you hack the ebbs and flows? And if you can, and if you can see opportunity in that, then this is the life for you.

I think the other thing that really — the little whisper in my ear became louder and louder and louder when I realized I’d been doing communications in-house for many, many years, loved it, learned a lot, but was losing my independent voice and perspective. Because at some point you become so married to the institutional voice and/or the executive voice — whether that’s ghostwriting or kind of inhabiting other people’s thoughts, or being the coach that’s glued to the internal team and helping them figure out what they wanna say.

And I think at heart I am a storyteller. And storytelling is really the thing that helps us imagine possibilities other than the reality we’re living in now. And I felt that it’s a use-it-or-lose-it situation, where at some point I might just be fully absorbed — I don’t know if it’s fully absorbed by the Matrix or the Borg or what it is — but I was probably needed to unplug before that happened and find my creativity and my storytelling again, so that I could use it for lots of different topics and causes and lots of different folks who are working on different things at different times.

And that’s what became the urge that I could not ignore.

Eric Brown: Well, yeah, I find that the storytelling is deep in the lipids. You can always draw down upon it at some point, even if it loses its prominence sometimes. And the other thing I was thinking about — whenever anyone ever asked me should I go out on my own, I just asked them: how thick is your stomach lining?

Regan Douglass: It’s good.

Eric Brown: That is the metric. We’re gonna take a very quick break and we will be back with Regan Douglass of Spark Wise Communications. We’re gonna talk a little bit more about nuts and bolts right after this break.

Kirk Brown: You’re listening to Let’s Hear It, a podcast about foundation and nonprofit

Eric Brown: communications hosted by Eric Brown and Kirk Brown.

If you’re enjoying this episode, you may just be a rule breaker. Check out season three of Break Fake Rules with Glen Galaich, CEO of the Stupski Foundation, as he chats with inspiring leaders in philanthropy, government, media, and more about breaking the fake rules that don’t work so that we can build a future that does. Check them out wherever you get your podcasts.

And now back to the show.

We are back with Regan Douglass of Spark Wise Communications, who not last year hung out a shingle. This was last year, wasn’t it?

Regan Douglass: It’s been almost two years.

Eric Brown: Ah, I can’t believe it’s been two years. Wow.

Regan Douglass: I know. Time passes.

Eric Brown: How time flies. Good lord. Okay. Let’s talk a little bit about the practical part of this. Not the vision — the plumbing. How did you structure your business? How did you figure out your rates? How’d you get your first client? All that stuff. There’s a website, all this stuff. You used to have somebody who did stuff for you and now you are that guy. What was that like? What’d you do?

Regan Douglass: Oh, I didn’t always have somebody who did stuff for me.

Eric Brown: There was like IT, and there was whatever, people.

Regan Douglass: That’s where you’re wrong. No, I’m just kidding. I did have — I sometimes had people who did stuff for me. I was lucky in that I’d had some jobs that were soup to nuts.

But the highly technical skills, those go away quickly as the external environment changes. So yeah, I talked to a lot of people. I did my research — I did enough research. I didn’t do so much research that I became paralyzed by the fear of not being able to plan at all. I eventually just picked a date and made the leap. But I had the benefit of a number of colleagues who had gone in and out of consulting who told me what you told me: how thick is your stomach lining? Do you have the temperament for lots and lots of change and the unexpected? Do you have a core set of skills that you like to offer? And for me it was strategic communications, coaching, campaign development, that sort of thing. Messaging, storytelling. So that was really useful.

I decided that I really wanted to be a shop of one for a while, because I didn’t wanna leap into something that was over structured and onerous and wouldn’t allow me to be nimble. I had heard too many stories from people who thought they knew where they wanted to specialize, and actually once they started doing consulting they changed their minds. Or they thought everything was great and they had work for three years and then the economy changed and they couldn’t pay their hires, and it was not a good feeling for anyone.

So those are a couple of things I did. The website was easy peasy — that’s something I’ve done a lot. And there are tons of great developers out there who can help you with the technical backend if you need that. And the other thing I would say — I got some great advice about finances. I got some good advice about, when I am ready to partner with other folks (which I’ve done), how to do that in a way that’s above board and in the clear and works for everyone. You’ll be able to share information and you won’t get blasted for some sort of legal infraction. All that was really helpful.

So I would say: do your homework. Consult a lawyer for at least an hour. Check that person’s wall to make sure they have a real diploma. Think about what sort of structure you wanna file as — LLC, S corp, all of those kinds of things.

But the bigger thing to wrap your head around is how do you want to spend the majority of your time? How do you make sure that you’re not only doing the work that’s right in front of you — that you’ve constantly got a pipeline of conversations going on and new work coming in. And the other thing I will say — and you tell me, Eric, if this is nuts-and-boltsy enough —

Eric Brown: Yeah.

Regan Douglass: One of my biggest tips for consultants — and I’ve been on the other side, right? I have plenty of opinions about how a consultant should or shouldn’t work with a nonprofit or a foundation and what they offer. I’ve hired and I’ve been across the table, so I really do understand. I think if you approach conversations less like pitches and more like you are talking with someone about ideas — you’re talking with someone who cares passionately about the work just as you do — and you want to figure out a solution that’s gonna serve the work, that is a conversation that opens up possibilities. That helps you listen much better. That helps you be more clear-sighted about whether or not you are actually a good fit for the project or if somebody else might be. And it helps you come back to the client sometimes and say, I know you think you want A, and I hear you — what about this other structure? What about this other thing first?

It’s just a totally different kind of conversation than “I am desperate to close this contract in the way this project was originally written within 45 minutes.” I think that shuts both folks in the conversation down. That’s probably my biggest tip to people who are first starting out, who may not be comfortable going out and finding their own work for the first time in their lives.

Eric Brown: There’s a variant on that, which is something — so you go into one of these things and you smell something funky.

Regan Douglass: Yes.

Eric Brown: And you go, uh-oh, I smell something funky. I think there’s something rotten and it’s in the back of the fridge. And when you smell that funky thing, I always tell people: get out.

Regan Douglass: Yep.

Eric Brown: It may be a lot of money, it may be a great opportunity, it may be a great organization, but if you smell that funky funk, it’s there and you gotta get out. That’s my little piece of advice.

Regan Douglass: Listen to your instincts. And sometimes it can be a little challenging to get back in touch with your instincts.

Eric Brown: Yeah.

Regan Douglass: Right. Some of us have done a really great job of shoving our instincts down and ignoring them and soldiering on. I mean, this is a strange moment in our history for instincts. But yes, if you think you smell a tuna fish sandwich wrapped in a giant red flag, that’s probably what it is.

Eric Brown: Yeah, I’ve had to do that and it’s just hard. One of the things I’ve noticed — and it often happens — you end up with lots of different kinds of things and it sometimes feels like you’re spinning plates with one hand and juggling chainsaws with the other.

Regan Douglass: Whoa.

Eric Brown: You know?

Regan Douglass: Do you have a chain mail glove is what I wanna know. And does it go all the way up your arm? Because I’m very concerned.

Eric Brown: Covers my head if I’m lucky. How do you manage lots of different kinds of things with different clients, because you’re doing different kinds of work invariably, right? Is that something you like? Is it something you’re good at? If not, how do you deal with it? How do you manage the stuff?

Regan Douglass: The stuff. Have you heard this term FOMO before?

Eric Brown: Yeah, of course.

Regan Douglass: Have you heard the term JOMO?

Eric Brown: No. I don’t know from this JOMO.

Regan Douglass: It’s the joy of missing out.

Eric Brown: Oh, I have no JOMO.

Regan Douglass: That’s why I never go to bed before four at a conference, ’cause I know there’s a party somewhere.

Eric Brown: Oh, fantastic.

Regan Douglass: The joy of missing out that comes with consulting is significantly fewer administrative and executive meetings. And I love —

Eric Brown: Oh, that. Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah.

Regan Douglass: I love humans. So that opens up a whole new world of time that you just didn’t have before. Right. So there’s that. I think I would say one great thing about consulting is the natural ebbs and flows. There might be many months on end when you are just crazy busy — it’s early mornings and late nights and weekends — but eventually there will be a downtime that will come when things will not come in.

And you can use that time to do some of your bigger thinking and cultivation, or just resting — a vacation that you weren’t planning to take but now you’re enjoying. The other thing is there should be through lines from one piece to another. And the more you learn and realize as you go, the more you are able to set up materials that will help you handle it when you have 30 different things going on. So it’s like, okay, I need this template, this boilerplate, this thing that I can tailor each time, and the next time I won’t be staring at a blank sheet of paper. I’ll have an entry point. Or I’ve done some research and it applies to several different projects that I’m working on — it’s really different for these different clients, but some of the research is a useful basis.

So those are a couple of things that I do. Again, working with partners and figuring out what do you uniquely do really well, and what can you bring somebody else in for, so that you can take on more work and you’re not absolutely drowning and the quality of the work doesn’t suffer. Those I would say are the main ones.

Eric Brown: Is there something about being an independent consultant that nobody warned you about? It could be psychological, it could be just the essence of that kind of job. Anything you weren’t expecting.

Regan Douglass: I’ve always heard — and I’ve done consulting off and on over the years, but these last two years, this is the first time I’ve really gone into it a hundred percent solo. That’s my main focus, and that is quite different. I have heard and seen that it can be difficult to get information sometimes that you might have when you’re inside an organization — like a fulsome picture of the situation. One positive thing that nobody warned me about is that there’s actually a benefit to that.

It’s sometimes really great to not be drowning in all the details and to just get the highlights, even if those highlights are very much colored by the timing of your conversation. It’s just: where are you now? And then you pull on the tendrils of what do you need to know? And it naturally limits the scope of the work.

I don’t know if you had this experience when you were in-house, but for me, almost every place I’ve been in-house — and most of my peers and colleagues who are in the communications role — you sometimes end up becoming kind of a therapist or counselor for the staff, or a surrogate strategy developer for any area of work. There’s creep, right? There’s creep in the job, and the longer you’re there, the bigger it gets.

So that’s one thing I would say. Another thing I would say, along those same lines: I have been surprised by how difficult it can be to get clear feedback. And I don’t mean just “yay, that was great and it was wonderful and life-changing, let’s keep going.” But actually: here’s what I was envisioning when we started the project, and here’s how it worked. And this is what I’m dealing with internally. And sometimes I’ll see the effect of those decisions and I have to back-map what happened and then figure out — okay, I’m intuiting that you’re having this difficult issue over here with a set of colleagues. This is actually not a communications issue that can be solved by you, with your team. This is actually a conversation you need to have with the CEO or the board. This is like an org-wide mission question that has been laid at your feet, but you’re not telling me, and you’re thinking it’s a communications issue, right?

So those kinds of things — all under the header of interpersonal communication. We’re not that great as a society at giving feedback that’s designed for a difficult, constructive conversation. I think we need to feel safe and we need to feel like we trust the other person in order to be able to do that. And it’s one of my biggest goals with every partner I work with — to make them understand that I am on their team and that they can tell me anything that’s gonna make the work better and more useful, and that I wanna hear anything they wanna tell me. But it takes time.

Eric Brown: Yeah. Alright. So let’s just say there’s someone listening. They’re like, oh my god, I wanna be Regan, I wanna do exactly what Regan did. Is there a question you’d want them to be honest with themselves about before they did that?

Regan Douglass: Well, I will make it a little bit about this moment and say that we’re in a really particular moment in our field. Many of your listeners are foundation and nonprofit folks doing good at mission-driven orgs in the social sector, right?

Eric Brown: All of our listeners are doing good. If they’re not doing good, they’re not allowed to listen.

Regan Douglass: They’re doing good in their sleep even, and they don’t even know it. That is how pure of heart and intention they are, right?

Eric Brown: Well, only sometimes — I only do well in my dreams, but you know, when I wake up I’m like, ah. But anyway, go ahead.

Regan Douglass: I don’t believe that for one minute, but I’m glad to hear that you’re having good dreams. You might be.

Eric Brown: I’m a much better consultant in my dreams.

Regan Douglass: Oh, same.

Eric Brown: This is true.

Regan Douglass: Same. I think that, you know, our field goes through moments like many do — especially many that are so tied to what’s happening socially, economically, politically. More openness and transparency, more of a sense of kind of coherent movement building. That’s an environment where I think people feel more comfortable being open. It’s clearer that different folks can contribute different things, but you’re all working towards the same goal.

And right now I think a lot of people are feeling — a lot of nonprofit leaders, a lot of researchers and advisors, and the folks who benefit from the work of nonprofits — are feeling like we’re in a resource scarcity environment. There’s a lot of chaos coming at foundations and nonprofits and public-serving institutions. That’s by design. It has a chilling effect. It has a distracting effect. And as a result of some of that pivoting, or that paralysis, I am seeing folks be a little more guarded and a little more in the sort of zero-sum game competition space.

And I completely get it. I understand. I don’t think there’s any malicious intent, but I would say: think about who you are as a consultant in that moment. And I understand that there’s a degree of privilege embedded in it. It’s part of the reason that I would love to see more foundations and nonprofits intentionally support women-led consultancies, consultancies that are led by people of color, consultancies that are coming up out of the communities that they serve, and are really contributing a perspective that a foundation or nonprofit may not have.

Who are you in that moment? If it’s more of a scarcity environment, how are you gonna operate? Whether that’s your own mental health, whether that’s your strategy, whether that’s your savings — I mean that in the most practical way, but I also mean that in the mindset way of: can you show up every day and not freak out? Are you still able to do good work? Is it worthwhile?

And for me, I really believe that systems sometimes can’t really be improved enough around the margins. They have to be profoundly reimagined and replaced. And I think sometimes these moments of intense upheaval result in a better world. But you have to engage with that. You have to be the dreamer and the storyteller that sees the utopia and doesn’t back away. And that requires the thick stomach lining that you were talking about.

Eric Brown: Well, I could not agree with you more. I also think that it gives you, and our colleagues in the consulting world, an opportunity to help folks navigate these difficult times. Because folks really can turn inward, can lose some perspective, and can operate out of fear — and understandably so. But boy, oh boy, is it helpful to have somebody come in and talk them off the ledge and give them very specific things to do and help guide them through difficult times.

So without putting too fine a point on it, I think the prospect for these kinds of partnerships is very real and it can be really productive. And if I were hiring somebody, you would be at the top of my list. I have so much enjoyed working with you over the years. I’m thrilled that your work is as robust and wonderful as it is. Regan Douglass, thank you so much for coming on and talking with us.

Regan Douglass: Thank you, Eric. It was lovely to see you as always.

Kirk Brown: And we’re back. So before we get to the communications and the wisdom and the good humor and the willingness to waste time with us on our podcast, which is always so generous —

Eric Brown: Yes.

Kirk Brown: I am telling you this is about courage. Regan has worked for some very significant organizations over a storied career, has accomplished so much. And at a certain point, Regan says, you know what? Now’s the time. So all of Regan’s incredible gifts, talents, and experience — this decision to step into this role is just incredibly courageous. And I guess I’m wanting to call this out so much because first I wanna acknowledge and congratulate Regan on the change and her willingness to talk about it.

But also, who knows how many of our listeners might have this itch, might be thinking, you know what, maybe I could have impact. And I say: do it. Just like we say, write the book. Make this change.

Eric Brown: I agree. It was, as I said, one of the best decisions I ever made. The other one was proposing to my wife, although she will say that she proposed to me — there is a point of contention there.

Kirk Brown: Where on that list is this podcast?

Eric Brown: Very, very low. It’s somewhere between whether I got the gray suit instead of the blue suit.

Kirk Brown: Okay, gotcha.

Eric Brown: But anyway, so after getting married and deciding to have a child, becoming my own consultant was probably the best and smartest decision I ever made. And so it can work for people, and it’s certainly working for Regan, who is really good. She’s busy, she’s so engaged, and as you got from this conversation, she’s the kind of person you wanna bounce ideas off of. She’s the kind of person you wanna have in the room to teach you stuff. And I think that is one of the roles that a consultant can and should play.

Kirk Brown: And this glimmer of insight — you know, Regan describes having that justice heart, wanting to see a world that’s fundamentally better and can be changed for the good, but then recognizing that communications is where the special sauce happens. And I think this is this huge trajectory that change and philanthropy is still making, and it makes me have a question: is communication still the add-on thing that gets tacked onto the strategy? Or is it actually the centerpiece of the strategy? Because I think we would argue it’s gotta be the centerpiece, but it still feels like it floats around somewhere in the ether a lot of the time. And Regan gets this — it’s like, no, communications has gotta be at the centerpiece of how you think about strategy.

Eric Brown: Communications is the camel’s nose under the strategy tent. I’ve said it many times and it’s true. Because what’ll happen is someone will bring you in — like, oh, we need to do some messaging. And you go, yeah, sure, I know where this is going. Yeah, we need to name this thing. And then you start asking four questions about what are you trying to achieve, and they go, damnit, we need to do strategy. And then you end up asking these strategic questions and then you’re into strategy. That’s always how it goes.

Kirk Brown: And Regan said she’s had like 20 different jobs? Because that’s the other thing too: to do this communications work artfully, strategically, and well, you need to draw on so much experience and expertise. And I would say that as Regan is moving through the world and collecting these different experiences, that’s all coming in. That’s all part of then the package of what becomes Regan Douglass at Spark Wise Communications. That’s what you’re drawing on when you actually pull on the resources of a consultancy like this — you get more than that person. You get more than that communications expertise. You get this worldview that’s been shaped by all these different experiences.

And I would argue, Eric, that that’s a version of what happened for you too when you left your big institutional job. Now all of a sudden you’re sitting in these different settings and you can bring all of this experience to bear, and it makes you a very nimble player in this very kind of crazy, weird, nichy world that we live in related to all this stuff.

Eric Brown: Well, when people hire me, they think they’re getting the guy who used to run communications at the Hewlett Foundation. But what I’m really drawing upon is the time that I spent teaching comedy traffic school.

Kirk Brown: Tell us more.

Eric Brown: Well, I was in college and I saw a flyer, so I took the test or whatever I had to do, and they certified me to teach comedy traffic school, which I would do on a Saturday morning at eight o’clock out in Walnut Creek or someplace very different from where I was in Berkeley. And we’d sit there for eight hours in a hotel conference room, and I would have to teach traffic school and I was supposed to be funny. So you go in with this expectation: okay buddy, make me laugh, I’m not supposed to be here. And then you run out of material in about two hours and you have to teach eight hours or else it’s a felony, so you gotta figure out how to vamp. So I would vamp.

Kirk Brown: Interesting.

Eric Brown: So I think the more interesting work that I provide draws from my comedy traffic school days than it does from anything I might’ve learned at the Hewlett Foundation.

Kirk Brown: Well, can we talk — Regan was at the College Futures Foundation, and can we talk a little bit about… there are so many different parts of Regan’s experience that we could draw on, but one thing that she mentioned that struck me particularly — and this is a big deal when foundations do this — she helped create a news media investment portfolio.

Eric Brown: Yeah. Yeah.

Kirk Brown: At that foundation. And so —

Eric Brown: Totally cool.

Kirk Brown: Oh, isn’t that great? So you’ve got the whole thing: you’ve got the strategy, what are the policy outcomes we’re trying to create, here are all the partners that can make this thing happen. You of course bring in your top-notch communications consultants to help amp up everybody’s skills. And you’re getting into the field and then all of a sudden philanthropy realizes, oh yeah, and we can invest in our own media channels to create coverage of these topics.

And the one thing I like about how our field does it versus some others is that this is fact-based, evidence-based, real journalism. Factual journalism that’s being supported. So it’s like multiple wins there. We’re not just seeding the field with more crazy-making propaganda. This is like: actually, can we put forward real stories told by real people that capture real successes in the field, that are documented and verifiable and are replicable because they’re gonna be useful in other places.

So that part of what Regan has done — I feel like that’s another enormous piece of the puzzle in terms of what Regan can bring to bear: that understanding of how this whole mechanism and plumbing of communications can really help you get things done.

Eric Brown: Well, one of the things when you go out to become a consultant is you try and figure out what are the things I know that help. And one of the things I’m interested in that also helps, and gives you a leg up — you don’t always get that opportunity. Sometimes someone will come and ask you to do something that you haven’t done or didn’t think about doing. But as my old boss Paul Brest used to say, this is a variation on: if you wanna learn about something, teach a class in it. Because he was a professor at Stanford and they’d ask him to teach a class that he didn’t know anything about. So he’d learn a lot about it.

And I also think if you wanna learn something, you should become a consultant in it. You learn fast. Usually it’s just subject matter — you get quick on subject matter, something that you didn’t quite know, and you have to learn quickly. And actually it helps not to be too steeped in subject matter as a consultant anyway, because you don’t wanna be the one who hears the music in their head and nobody else does. So you have to come into this work with something of a Buddhist beginner’s mind where you act like the outsider, ’cause you are. And you react to the things that you see based on that perspective. And often, you know, we think we’re talking to folks who we’re not actually talking to — we’re talking to ourselves. And that’s a big problem.

So I do think that sometimes you go into a project that you don’t have a ton of familiarity with, and that’s really helpful. But the other part is: find something that you know a lot about and you’re good at, and make that your area.

Kirk Brown: Well, this reflection alone would get me on the phone to hire Spark Wise Communications. When Regan says strategic communications is jet fuel — I love that way of thinking about this work. This is jet fuel. And I kind of wish I’d had that metaphor in my back pocket for all these years, because that’s exactly how it works. When you get this work ordered in the right way, with the right supports, with the right stuff happening in the field, and the right messengers and storytellers — now you’re in narrative, now you’re amplifying impact. It’s absolutely jet fuel.

And it’s so painful to see so many of our organizations that are doing the frontline work, the most important work — they’re not being fueled. And it’s so easy to say that’s just a matter of bad strategy and tactics. I actually don’t think that’s necessarily fair. I actually don’t think they’re being resourced at the level at which they need to be so that they could take advantage. Like, you need the jet to put the fuel into, you know? And this is again a role that a consultant like Regan can play — to drop in, almost be that frontline person to say, hey, this is how we can get some quick wins, this is how we can get this work done. So I love that notion of jet fuel. It’s just totally on the mark.

Eric Brown: I will have to give Regan a little bit of grief for using a fossil fuel reference. But that’s okay.

Kirk Brown: Hey, you don’t know what that fuel’s made of.

Eric Brown: I think I do.

Kirk Brown: It could be —

Eric Brown: I think it’s made of dinosaurs.

Kirk Brown: Could be electricity, who knows?

Eric Brown: Could be. But that’s okay — we forgive you, Regan. No, it’s true. You come in and you do have the opportunity to make those folks really see how they can be successful, how they can make a difference. And I had this conversation today with somebody who mistook communications for messaging. Because he’s like, oh, that’s just communications. No, no, no. Communications is the thing that connects you to your audience and to their heart — that inspires people, that unlocks that, that requires you to ask all of the strategic questions about what it is we’re trying to achieve and who it is we’re trying to persuade, and what is it that they care about. And then how do I create messages that connect with them, that speak to their values? That’s not messaging. That is understanding how change gets made.

And that’s what a really good communications consultant can do. So don’t let anyone tell you that communications is just messaging — that’s not what we do.

Kirk Brown: So let’s kick the tires a little bit. Maybe kick the door open a little bit —

Eric Brown: It’s kicking —

Kirk Brown: for the person who’s thinking about what’s down there across the street, but they can’t leave the 15th story of the 40-story building that they’ve been in, doing this institutional work for so long.

Let’s talk a little bit about the joy of missing out.

Eric Brown: JOMO.

Kirk Brown: JOMO, which was introduced in our interview. So what are the things that you start trading out of when you leave that massive institutional home? There were a couple of things that were right up top of mind. You’re not in this performance review factory — which, by the way, the fact that that’s such a known deficiency for most people’s experience just puts such a spotlight on —

Eric Brown: Nobody likes it.

Kirk Brown: Maybe we need to be building capacity around performance and performance management if it’s such a universally dreadful thing for everybody.

Eric Brown: Nobody likes it. Everybody hates it.

Kirk Brown: I’ll never forget — my daughter was, I don’t know, three or four, no, younger than that, whenever you start getting your teeth — and we went to this kids’ dentist for the first time, and I’m like, wait a minute, when did they figure out that making going to the dentist could be one of the funnest things that could happen to a really young kid? I was so angry. I was like, I wanna go to the kids’ dentist.

Eric Brown: I was so angry.

Kirk Brown: Like wait, you’re telling me I can’t — I would love to go. But this is a similar thing. It’s like the fact that these performance review processes are so dreadful for all of us. It’s like we’re still doing that thing.

Eric Brown: Next time I go in for a performance review, I want a clown.

Kirk Brown: Yeah, that’s right. Make it fun, make it engaging. How about something that meaningfully —

Eric Brown: Not a scary guy.

Kirk Brown: How about something that meaningfully energizes me and makes me excited to do the work. How about that? But also —

Eric Brown: You know what that’s called? It’s called a raise.

Kirk Brown: But also the notion of just being so married to a single institutional or executive voice — actually being able to branch out from that. I thought that was interesting, that notion of being fully absorbed by the Borg and all of a sudden now you need to step out of that.

From a certain perspective, having watched work perform over time — and we don’t need to talk about mine, but I have my own version of this — actually being able to be in the field, doing the stuff you love, being directly involved with it and not having these layers of, let’s call it what it is, bureaucracy. That’s another enormous freedom that shows up when you start making transitions like this.

Eric Brown: Yeah, that’s right. And I once had a gig where I was the interim — I was running communications for a foundation — and they asked me how much time they thought I would need, and I said, eh, 15 to 20 hours a week. Like, what do you mean? It’s a full-time job. Yeah, but the actual working part is 15 to 20 hours a week if you’re lucky.

Regan Douglass: Right?

Eric Brown: Because the other 20-something hours a week is trying to figure — you know, going to a meeting where you have to decide whether to put peanuts in the M&Ms. You know? I was once in a meeting where we decided which doors to lock and which ones to leave open. That’s not communications. It’s part of being a good organizational citizen and you do it. But the actual work of the thing that we do — you don’t do nearly as much of it. And actually as a communications director after a while, I wasn’t doing anything at all. I was just hiring consultants to do the stuff that I don’t have time to do because I’m trying to figure out whether we should use peanut M&Ms or not.

Kirk Brown: Well, and the painful inventory that anybody working in the context of a really large organization could make. We’re not management process consultants, so we’re not offering solutions to this, but we’re just identifying the problem — which is, anybody who works in that big setting, if you really did an inventory per week of the time you spend that serves you versus the time you spend that doesn’t serve you, and I’m not talking about the downtime where you feel like you’re wasting time — I’m talking about, you know, the time where I’m like, this just doesn’t serve me — it’s such an enormous load on all of us.

And that’s one of the things I’ve witnessed running a nimble virtual enterprise for over a decade. I never, ever look at a calendar of meetings for a week — and our calendars are packed — where I’m like, what am I doing there? What’s the purpose of that? What’s the agenda? What’s the outcome we’re gonna get to? So there’s this efficiency that shows up, but you don’t even call it efficiency. You’re just doing the work. You’re enjoying it.

So that is one thing that happens when you step out. Now, Regan mentioned it. I think we should spend a couple of — in the effort to be balanced and fair and —

Eric Brown: Oh, good.

Kirk Brown: Recognize the whole thing.

Eric Brown: About time.

Kirk Brown: You also represented accurately.

I think that when you go on your own, one question you need to ask yourself is: how thick is my stomach lining? Because let’s face it, it can be stressful. And I would say among the many stressors for people leaving philanthropy, this is the huge change. And I thought that Regan had some really artful ways to talk about this change.

Because instead of being the money giver, with the line out the door and around the block and over the horizon of all the people saying, here’s my best idea, will you fund it? — now you’re actually in that line saying, actually, here’s an idea, have you thought about this before? And that’s a radically different place to be in the world.

Eric Brown: When you leave the foundation, you figure out who your friends are — that’s for sure. And the weird thing — I was gonna say, you learn you’re not as smart as you used to think you were, but —

Kirk Brown: Or as good looking.

Eric Brown: Yeah. But that’s actually sort of kind of not true. When you’re a consultant, you are brought in to be the smart person.

Kirk Brown: Yeah.

Eric Brown: And sometimes you’re brought in to solve the problem. And you’ll go into a meeting and someone will bring up a question, and they’ll say, well, what does our fancy communications consultant have to say? And 10 heads swivel in your direction. Your job is to say something useful and meaningful. And the fact is it doesn’t have to be the best idea, it just has to be a firmly convicted idea. ’Cause people wanna be led — okay great, take us someplace.

And so I think the courage of one’s convictions really helps. You have an idea and you just have to kind of put yourself behind it. And the other thing is, I used to hire consultants to tell my colleagues the thing I’d been telling them for a long time, because I’m just a schmo on staff and this is the expert from the real world who’s coming in to give us their expertise.

And so sometimes it is a partnership with your comms director, client, or whomever — it’s like, okay, let’s figure out how we can communicate with our own staff here at this foundation or at this nonprofit, because the in-house folks are — you know, familiarity breeds, I don’t know, maybe if not contempt. So that’s where the consultant plays another important role: to reinforce ideas that the comms director had already been trying to float but couldn’t get through because they’re on staff. Or to come up with new ideas that help people unlock something that had been locked for a long time.

Kirk Brown: Yeah. And it’s funny, one of the things I say around our shop all the time is: nobody calls us when it’s easy.

Eric Brown: Yeah, that’s true.

Kirk Brown: If it’s one plus one equals two, the phone is probably not gonna ring. We’re needed to think about some of the harder things. But to that point, you need to be able to be salient, persuasive, evidence-based where that’s possible. You need to actually have some grounding in what you’re trying to do. And again, this is the kind of natural skill set that someone with the depth and breadth of experience that Regan brings — that’s what Regan walks through the door with.

Eric Brown: That’s right.

Kirk Brown: That notion of being able to be informative, just think about ideas. Regan did point out — I thought you had a very interesting exchange around this — sometimes it’s hard to get the full picture when you’re coming in from the outside. And then I really liked your comment: if you smell something funky —

Eric Brown: Oh yeah.

Kirk Brown: You get out. And this is the other part too, because sometimes the consultant budget is bigger than the willingness to actually do the real work. And so sometimes that whole exercise of bringing somebody in, even for well-compensated projects, can actually be just not great, not productive.

But again, now suddenly as the consultant, you can self-select in or out of that dynamic, which is not a choice you get to make when you’re inside the Borg.

Eric Brown: No, that’s true.

Kirk Brown: You’re just going to the next meeting. So I loved your reflection —

Eric Brown: What you said about the tuna fish sandwich wrapped in a red flag. Yeah, no, I’ve had a few of those. Oh, I made a bad mistake, I gotta get out of here. And I have, you know, gently, quietly backed out of the room. But it’s better if you don’t let that thing happen in the first place. And if you’re a consultant and you’re really looking for money, trying to build your base and your client list — it’s very hard to say no to a bad idea. But if you’re out there, say no to the bad idea. I promise you another good idea will come along. It just will.

Kirk Brown: So, speaking of good ideas, I’ve got an enormously good idea that I’m stealing from Regan’s interview.

Eric Brown: Oh, interesting. Okay.

Kirk Brown: So Regan closes by making the pitch: let’s have more women-led and people-of-color-led consultancies that are actually ready for us, who can help us in those moments. So here’s a pitch I wanna make to global philanthropy. Put your “ready for us” consultancies on a $1,000 a month retainer just to be in your phone book — first calls you make when you’re looking for help. And seed those lists with women-led and people-of-color-led consultancies.

So this is a zero-ask request to a consultancy where you say, look, we just want to know that you’re out there and ready to support us. Here’s a thousand dollars a month to do nothing. Just take our call. And we know you would take our call anyway, because this is your business development. But we’re actually gonna put some skin in the game to say we care enough about you. And then we’ll tell our team internally, hey, there’s no barrier to entry — you can call them. Maybe you put some boundaries on it — you say we’re buying four hours of free time per month, or something like that, for that thousand dollars.

But then you use that to seed these lists of consultancies that are women-led and people-of-color-led, and in whatever communities you think should be better represented to better reflect your work. So you’re actually driving resources into those consultancies even before you put them on the hook for a contract. What do you think about that idea?

Eric Brown: Foundations are rich. Make it two.

Kirk Brown: There you have it.

Eric Brown: Make it three. They’ve got plenty of money.

Kirk Brown: They do.

Eric Brown: They only spend 5% of it, but they have plenty of money.

Kirk Brown: There you have it. But just saying, hey, we just care about your capacity to be available for us. And obviously that’s got a field-building dimension too, because the more healthy organizations we can create, the more that can be useful and beneficial to all sorts of other organizations and create the outcomes that you actually want. Let’s say it’s $3,000 a month — you want your $36,000 of investment to create millions of dollars of beneficial change.

Eric Brown: Sure.

Kirk Brown: I think it will happen more often if these organizations are incrementally healthier as a result of that. And if MacKenzie Scott hears this and gets super excited, let’s add a couple more zeros. But these firms are out there. They’re knowable, they’re known, they’ve got credentials, they’re doing the work, and everybody is struggling these days. So why not put a little bit of support out there before we even ask people to do the work?

And the reason I would put a dollar value to it is because we want these groups to be known. We wanna create an intentional process to pull them forward. So that could potentially be a project that Spark Wise Communications heads up on behalf of a coalition of foundations to identify those firms, vet them, and then create the mechanisms through which they can all get paid.

So Regan, that might be something you —

Eric Brown: The Tom Sawyer of everything. You got people to paint your fence.

Kirk Brown: See, another great idea. This was a great conversation. Regan Douglass, we’re so happy to have you in this world, this part of the world. Two years you’ve had your shingle out — very timely, so glad it’s been going well.

And again, if you’re listening to this and you’re thinking, can I do this? The answer is yes. You can absolutely do this. So give it a shot. Why not? What do you think, Eric?

Eric Brown: Yeah. Call Regan and ask Regan about things. You can always call me — I take everybody’s calls. I’m always happy to help people do anything at all. So, but yeah, it’s a wonderful life. I have to tell you.

Kirk Brown: Well, that’s Regan Douglass, the founding principal at Spark Wise Communications. And you can find Regan at sparkwisecommunications.com. Please reach out, talk to Regan, hire Regan. And if you’re thinking about entering this world, please do.

We can say from firsthand experience that there’s more help always needed, and you have the skills to help. So become a helper. Eric, that was a great conversation. Thank you for doing that.

Eric Brown: Well, thank you, Kirk, and thank you always for being so cheerful.

Kirk Brown: Come on, this is great. Courage, everybody.

Regan Douglass: Courage. And let’s hear it. We’ll see you next time.

Kirk Brown: Okay, everybody. That’s it for this episode. Please let us know if you have any thoughts about what you heard today or people we should have on this show, and that definitely includes yourself. And we’d like to thank John Ali, the tuneful and inspiring composer of our theme music,

Eric Brown: our sponsor, the Lumina Foundation,

Kirk Brown: and please check out Lumina’s terrific podcast, Today’s Students Tomorrow’s Talent, and you can find that at luminafoundation.org.

Eric Brown: We certainly thank today’s guest and of course all of you,

Kirk Brown: and most importantly, thank you, Mr. Brown.

Eric Brown: Oh, no, no, no, no. Thank you, Mr. Brown.

Kirk Brown: Okay, everybody, till next time.