Don’t rise to the occasion—plan. In this hands-on workshop, we’ll break out the tools and strategies you need to respond swiftly to a crisis, whether it’s new tariffs upsetting the supply chain, economic uncertainties, sudden reputational damage, or a rogue exec. Learn how to identify early warning signs on social media, build adaptable frameworks that will work within a variety of different events, and create scalable, pre-approved communications materials. Get ready to:

• Chart the Course: How to build a comprehensive crisis timeline and escalation protocol that clarifies who, when, and how, across multiple channels.
• Partner with Leadership: Build workflows that speed up legal, executive and compliance reviews for time-sensitive situations.
• Crisis Tabletops: How to set up an internal rapid response simulation in a controlled environment for common crisis scenarios like social media blowups or misinformation.
• Measurement Matters: It’s not just before the event: how to track the impact of your crisis plan from incident to recovery, and how those post-mortem checks can be used to plan for the future.
• Silence versus Statement: Business crisis, reputational risks, and physical emergencies all require different responses.

It’s no longer enough to respond to change; successful comms leaders need to anticipate and manage the rollout of changes in business strategies, new regulatory requirements, or even implementations of new technology within their workforce. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll explore the importance of readiness assessments to gauge your organization’s appetite for change, along with methods for engaging stakeholders who might be cautiously skeptical or outright resistant. Get ready to learn about:

• The Four Stages of Change: How to prepare for change by looking at the four steps—disruption, exploration, rebuilding, and transformation—and how to anticipate common pitfalls.
• Risk Assessment and Mitigation: How to evaluate organizational appetite for change and leadership support—and how to spot potential roadblocks early.
• Methodologies and Frameworks: Comparative analysis of key approaches (Kotter, ADKAR) and their ideal use cases—plus tactics to adapt universal models for mergers, tech rollouts, and shifting corporate goals.
• Stakeholder Engagement: Techniques to identify, categorize, and proactively collaborate with individuals critical to your change efforts.
• Communications Foundations: Essentials and timelines for crafting transparent, timely messages that resonate with all relevant parties.

Continue the conversation at dinner with new friends.

Join Ragan’s editorial team in a panel discussion sharing the highest moments from 2025—as well as a sneak peek on what’s ahead. We’ll share exclusive data from our collaboration with HarrisX, statistics from Ragan’s Benchmark report, and wrap with our top five trends to watch out for.

Mergers, layoffs, AI and reorgs have complicated org charts for internal communicators and HR professionals, who find themselves   needing to help manage a workforce hungry (or intimidated) by AI advancements. Learn how to stay strategic, not just reactive, and help future-proof your skillset—and your team’s—for what’s next. Discover:

• Scope Redefinitions: How to partner across departments to delineate shared vs owned responsibilities, advocating for headcount with data, and how to make sure your goals align with the strategic needs of the business—not legacy or inherited tasks.
• Future Skills: Business and data fluency, AI prompting, behavioral design and more: the learning paths that comms professionals need to take, and why.
• AI on the Org Chart: Why it’s critical to be AI-fluent, and not AI-reliant, and how Agentic AI can support efficiencies versus where human judgement is non-negotiable.
• Managers First: How to rollout toolkits and training for people leaders, as well as how to prepare them with answers for common questions about AI adoption, economic uncertainties and upskilling.
• Learning and Development: How to prioritize learning journeys by leveraging data, partnering with HR to position upskilling as a core part of the employee value proposition, and using internal influencers to increase participation.
• Team Structure: How to build a department that is deep in comms craft, broad in business acumen, and agile enough to flex with future needs.

It’s critical to measure why you matter, but internal communicators often struggle to demonstrate their value with quantifiable outcomes.  This session will help you identify KPIs that ladder up to business needs and what your organization values, such as retention, culture or operational readiness. You’ll leave prepared to build a measurement strategy that earns trust at the executive level.

• Corporate Goal Alignment: How to tie employee satisfaction, engagement, and participation in culture-based activities or ERGs to corporate needs.
• Delivering Your Point of View: How to storytell with data and dashboards to share critical information that execs can understand.
• Beyond Clicks: Skip the metrics like open rates. Your KPIs should measure knowledge retention and absorption of key leadership policies with pulse surveys, quizzes and message recall.
• The Employer Net Promoter Score: Why tracking if your employees would recommend your organization to others still holds water, and how to measure and track sentiment over time.
• Yes, You Still Need an Annual Survey: But it may be time for a revamp to eliminate legacy questions, unclear or misleading questions, and build in action items based on employee answers.
• Sentiment and Comms-Driven Actions: How to track the percentage of employees who act after receiving internal messages, and why—including communication gaps or tone shifts preceding spikes in voluntary exits.

From Gen X decision makers to Gen Z disruptors (and the rising tide of Gen Alpha), communicators in today’s changing workplace must navigate a web of expectations, platforms and preferences. This future-focused panel explores how to bridge generational perspectives, avoid bias, and create inclusive strategies that speak to everyone—from seasoned professionals to digital natives raised in the metaverse. Learn how emerging platforms, shifting values, and longer life spans (and potentially fewer retirees) are redefining the modern workplace. We’ll explore:

• The Five-Generation Workplace: How longer lifespans, retirement trends and delayed exits are shifting workplace demographics.
• Audience Segmentation, Updated: How to approach internal and external communications by mindset, not age.
• Generational Tension: How to pivot around shifting expectations between traditional corporate norms and emerging expectations around purpose, flexibility and feedback.
• Side Hustles, Second Jobs: More than one third of adults hold a second job or occasional side gig, and it’s common with younger generations. Here’s what you need to know to make sure your moonlighting employees aren’t a reputational risk for your brand.
• Tech Trials: How the generational divide has become the digital divide, and how different generations are interacting with technology differently—from ChatGPT to Google search and social platforms.
• Speaking Their Language: How to identify and connect communications preferences, and how to identify unconscious bias or blind spots in language, tone, and assumptions that may alienate younger or older audiences.
• Planning for the Future: How to plan for a workplace that’s working longer, and how this affects wellness programs, career pathing and engagement strategies.

Communicators are expected to be tech-savvy strategists, culture builders, data analysts and AI experts—all while serving as advisors to the c-suite on those same topics. If you’re trying to figure out how to do it all—and coach your team while you’re at it—   these are the practical learning and development strategies you need, including:

• Strategic Fluency: The levers that matter the most to leadership, including data translation, cultural insights, AI knowledge, and collaboration.
• Hands-On Learning: How to build in cross-departmental rotations shadowing or co-working with teams like IT, HR, Legal or Marketing to understand their challenges, vocabulary and comms needs.
• AI and Tech Sprints: How to roll out short, internal workshops dedicated to specific tools, ending with a hands-on challenge like redesigning a workflow.
• Training the Managers: How to prepare people leaders to upskill their teams around new technology such as Gen AI.
• Leadership Mapping: Real-world examples of mapping work to c-suite priorities, such as connecting a change cascade to productivity, or a recognition campaign to retention.
• Time Management: Why blocking protected time for curriculum development and skill-building is critical, and how to use techniques like rotating learning days to ensure development does not get deprioritized under daily demands.

Nonstop change and compounding stress will inevitably impact productivity and wellbeing. But what happens when anxiety becomes a baseline, and when adapting is no longer enough? In this keynote fireside, a veteran of air traffic control shares real stories and hard-won insights from an industry built to function in chaos. Through the lens of split-second decision-making, burnout recovery and mental endurance, you’ll learn what resilience truly looks like, how to build it into your own life, and how to bring that discipline into your own workplace, team and mindset.

• Recognizing Change Fatigue: How to spot the signs of mental overload early, before disengagement, resentment or quiet quitting.
• Sustainable Resiliency: How to build teams and habits that can weather constant disruption without sacrificing well-being.
• Recovering from Chronic Stress: What burnout does to productivity, communication and cognitive abilities, and how to repair from it.

You may be great at your job, but are you being remembered for it? Visibility is critical in today’s workplace overloaded with content, notifications, and noise. In this fireside conversation, you’ll learn the practical, modern strategies that help communicators stand out, earn trust, and lead with influence. Learn real-world tools and strategies like:

• Messaging Moments: The key moments where your presence shapes perception, such as company town halls, media interviews, and introductions to new team members, and how to prep for each.
• Leading with Prescence: How you can help your whole team show up more strategically, from junior staff to execs, without relying on hierarchy.
• Narrative Ownership: How to control your own reputation narrative and ensure it aligns with what others say when you’re not in the room.
• Digital Impressions: Why optimizing your email signature, LinkedIn headlines, Zoom names, and bios can reinforce credibility and make connections easier.

The most effective communicators aren’t just message crafters, they’re relationship architects. With distributed workforces and shifting org charts on the rise, the ability to connect people, functions and ideas is a strategic superpower. Learn how communicators that step into roles that mirror chiefs of staff—embedded across all departments and invited into high-level decision-making—are uniquely positioned to break siloes from the inside out. You’ll learn:

• Silo-Busting in Action: Innovative ways to get people talking—including simple analog techniques that could work inside your organization and at town halls.
• The Chief Connector Officer: How to step into a cross-functional leadership role by aligning people, timing and messaging across internal and external priorities.
• Closing the Loop: Turn cliché into action and establish feedback systems that complete the flywheel, like gathering intel from employees, linking insights and data back to leadership, and refining messaging that works to build trust and reinforce business strategies.
• Communicating Beyond Desks: Whether your employees are distributed, remote, deskless, or in-office, here are ways to break down those barriers—and measure how much information they are absorbing from your communications.
• Unifying Inputs and Outputs: A breakdown of where comms can connect with enterprise inputs (change initiatives, strategic pivots) with outputs (productivity, retention, brand advocacy).

Get ready to mingle with our host-led networking challenge.