Karen Downs
Head of Strategic Communications Practice, Global Markets - Staffbase
Karen Downs has spent more than 20 years running enterprise intranets from the inside, at Sprint, H&R Block, and NYU Langone Health, owning the governance, information architecture, and adoption calls that determine whether an intranet serves employees or buries them. She's seen those decisions play out at scale: a $3M intranet consolidation at Sprint recognized by Nielsen Norman Group as a top-10 global site, and a #4 globally ranked intranet at H&R Block, benchmarked against 256 organizations.
She's the author of Digital Endurance: Leadership Practices That Prepare Organizations for What’s Next, publishing in September 2026. It's a practitioner's book for the people who own the intranet and inherit everyone else's decisions about it. Digital Endurance covers governance, information architecture, search, employee listening, and measurement. This is the work that determines whether an intranet stays useful or becomes a graveyard.
Karen is currently Head of Strategic Communications Practice, Global Markets, at Staffbase, where she advises enterprise organizations and equips customer-facing teams to make better digital workplace decisions. Her work turns more than two decades of practitioner experience into practical frameworks for governance, information architecture, adoption, and employee experience.
