EdFund’s “Saminars” revive brown-bag lunch series

How one communicator revamped a dying face-to-face program into one that attracts more employees than a room can fill

When Eileen Barton Secor joined EdFund, one of the nation’s leading providers of student loan services under the Federal Family Education Loan Program, in January to lead internal communications, she inherited a executive management brown-bag lunch program that seemed to be on life support. Mostly the same dozen people showed up to the cramped space to hear a mostly one-way, hour-long presentation about what was happening in the host’s part of the business.

Secor knew something had to be done, but she wasn’t sure where to start. She turned to other communicators for help, posting a question on a MyRagan forum about how to breathe new life into the program.