Q&A: How to Run an Internal Campaign That Changes Hearts and Minds

Emily Sander explains how to change a workplace narrative by running an internal campaign, using catchy phrases, visuals, and repeated communication across multiple channels. She shares examples like NFL coach Mike MacDonald’s slogans “chase the edges” and calling backup players the “ready team,” and describes a Chief of Staff who made a teen mentoring program more visible by mentioning it in meetings and materials. The advice is to communicate the message so often that people can finish your sentence and almost get tired of hearing it.

Get in touch with Emily:
Want help shaping the narrative inside your organization? Book a clarity call w/ Emily here.

Free Leadership Resources

LinkedIn

Website

Newsletter

Who Am I?
If we haven’t met before - Hi👋 I’m Emily, Chief of Staff turned Executive Leadership Coach. After a thrilling ride up the corporate ladder, I’m focusing on what I love - working with people to realize their professional and personal goals. Through my videos here on this channel, books, podcast guest spots, and newsletter, I share new ideas and practical and tactical tools to help you be more productive and build the career and life you want.

Time Stamps:
00:59 Starting an Internal Campaign

01:22 Using Slogans and Phrases

02:57 Visuals and Analogies

03:44 Utilizing Different Mediums

04:18 Repetition and Reinforcement

07:20 Case Study: Nonprofit Campaign

10:15 Phases and Key Stakeholders

11:02 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Transcript

0:06

Welcome back to Leveraging Leadership, where we unpack the art of business leadership. I'm your host, Emily Sander, chief of staff to an executive leadership coach. This show is all about finding your points of greatest influence and leveraging them to better serve those around you.

Starting an Internal Campaign

Using Slogans and Phrases

Visuals and Analogies

Utilizing Different Mediums

Repetition and Reinforcement

Case Study: Nonprofit Campaign

Phases and Key Stakeholders

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

emily-sander_3_02-05-2026_155801 0:25

All right, we've got a listener question from t spelled TEE, and this says you can introduce her as a sassy blonde from Minneapolis. That's awesome. Okay. Uh, t's question is, how do I change the narrative around something? I'm trying to turn the people and culture. I wanna make this front and center, not just one more thing in a list. Thank you for all you do with your show. Okay. T Awesome. Thank you for. For your question. This is a good and interesting question. I'm not sure what we're changing the narrative about, but that's okay. The first thing that comes to mind is I think about this as a campaign. So you're running in an internal campaign, like a rebranding campaign, like a marketing campaign for your own teams. And you can kind of, sort of think about it like a political campaign where they have, uh, a slogan or like a catchphrase or maybe an analogy or a visual they go to. So it might be, so for instance, I'm a Seattle Seahawks fan, so NFL Football, Mike McDonald, the head coach has these catchphrases or slogans he uses with the team. So one of them is. We chase edges, we chase the edges, we practice and we chase the edges. And it means like we're always looking for the edge. We're always looking to go a little bit further than the competition or do something in, uh, in an innovative way. And we're chasing the edges. We're wanting to get that 1% better. If we can get, just get like that one step on the competition, then we're looking for those edges. We're chasing the edges. He also has another phrase, which I love, which is relentless effort. You wanna be a seahawk, you wanna be on this team. You have relentless effort all about that. he also calls the, the backup team, the ready team. So most teams have like their, their first string and then their second string team, like the backups. And he doesn't call'em that. He calls'em the ready team. So his next man up mentality, we have a team that's ready to go. Everyone that's on this team has gotta be ready to go at a moment's notice. And so he builds the people and he builds the type of player and he builds the culture through phrases like that. So if you have some of those go-to phrases that you say over and over and over again and people pick up on, I think that can be something that helps turn the people and turn the culture and lets people know this is what it means to be on this team now. This is what we're about. This is what our culture is, and you can turn the ship that way. Change the narrative that way. the other thing that can go along with that is a visual or an, an analogy. So if you, or a, or a visual of an analogy, but if you have something like, uh, we are going from this, which is like maybe a round wheel. Chiseled out of stone to this, which is like a flashy sports car, like a Ferrari, like zooming, and it's got four wheels going really fast. That might be a visual of here's we're going from this to this. We're changing the narrative. We used to be like this, and now we're like this. And if you can work that into the conversation or maybe work a graphic or a visual into newsletters or into posters or what have you, that can be part of your campaign as well. Use different mediums. So different mediums, meaning some people like emails, so send all company emails. Some people like to hear or see things, so it might be a video campaign or a series of videos from the CEO or from the executive team or whomever it might be, town halls. So CEO can go to town halls. It might be the chief of staff doing town halls or brown bag lunches to all of the various offices and making sure that messaging in that campaign is being brought to all the various offices. I would also encourage you to. Hit those channels multiple times. Not just one and done, not just, I perfectly crafted this all hands email and sent it out. There it is. Now everyone knows about the new narrative. Now everyone knows about the culture change and you walk around and you're like, I don't see this. Changing in the hallway, and I'm jumping on these zoom call meetings and in these in person like this is the same type of culture we had before. Did they not read my email? Some of them didn't. Some of them did not read your email or see your email at all. Some of them like read it or scanned it or like didn't quite understand or like whatever. Okay, that's, that's fine. But you wanna. Send'em a follow-up email, and maybe you're saying the same thing again, but in a different way. Maybe you're bringing this element of the message into the next communication. Maybe you're talking about this aspect of the culture in this next email. Maybe you're doing a town hall to support the email message you just sent to reinforce it. Maybe you're doing. Of video campaigns to reinforce stuff. Maybe you're having q and a sessions on Zoom. Maybe you're having office hours, like all these different things. It's a full court press. It's you're using these different channels and methods and mediums to get your message through and people receive that information differently. So hit'em up multiple times on multiple channels. Here's another guideline for you. You wanna communicate ad nauseam. You want to make people nauseous. Maybe you want to stop one step before they actually get sick, but you want them to like eye roll. Like I, I've heard this over and over again. Stop saying it. Stop saying it. You wanna stop one instant short of them punching you in the face. You see that one more time? If I have to hear that one more time, I'm gonna punch someone in the face. Great. Great job. You're communicating that. You're changing the people, you're changing the culture. If they can finish your sentence. If they can finish your sentence, you know, they've heard the message, so Nike, just do it. Um, Geico, save 20%. All these different things that you just, you just remember, like, it's just part of the air. You want to get to that point where they finish your sentence and they're kind of annoyed, like they're kind of annoyed with the message. You certainly want to be sick, like you should be like, I am, I am Ill. From saying this so many times because you are probably saying it to the entire company, but then all the business units and the follow up messaging and the questions and coordinating this and saying it to the executive team and then saying it to the VPs and then saying it to the managers and then going to the rank and file and saying the message like it's the first time you're saying this, but really it's the 12th, but you're still excited about the message'cause it's great. So you should be like, I am like. Physically done with this message, and that's when you know that you're doing it just about the right amount of time, about the right amount of reps you have in there. Okay? The other thing is just start integrating this into conversation and into the rhythm of business. So I remember I was talking to a chief of staff and she was working for a nonprofit and they were very well known for their homelessness efforts, so to end homelessness and their, their drives and initiatives in the community. They were very well known for that. They were well known for their teen mentoring program. They had a teen mentoring program that was really cool and did a lot of great things as well. The teen mentoring program was not even well known in their own company, like in that or in their own organization. People didn't really know they had, oh, oh, we have, oh yeah, we have that. It was one of those things. And so this chief of staff was trying to incorporate this, messaging and getting this, the fact that teen mentoring program was the thing we did. And what's the thing? We did actually quite well, and the first level of that campaign was internal to get the internal team members aware and reminded that this was a thing. And so we talked about, okay. In the next All Hands meeting where people do a report out of the major initiatives of the nonprofit, make sure that there's a section for the Teen Mentoring program and make sure it's talked about just like all the other initiatives, like just like the Homelessness Initiative, just like all the other main initiatives people knew about. Make sure that starts to be included. Make sure like at, there's all hands, there's board meetings, there's steering committees, there's all these different touch points where anytime you're doing. The main staple things of the organization. The teen mentoring is just one of those things, and so like, oh, we have that. A good reminder and, oh, here's how we do that and here's how it's doing. And it's doing quite well. We actually have some of the leading, leading, uh, metrics and, and stats around this. Oh, okay. Like, cool. That's something that we can be proud of. And in fact, that's something that I'm proud of and I wanna talk to people outside of my organization about that. Or if I run into, someone in my community and they, there's a. Opening in a conversation for like, we're looking for, you know, so-and-so is having trouble. Um, and they're a teenager and they're kind of like getting squirrely with these friend groups and, you know, not doing so great with the grades in school. Oh, like, well, did you know we have a teen mentoring program and it does this, this, and this, and here's how you can contact us. All those things. So. The first line of her campaign, and we did talk about it like a campaign was the internal one. And so that's what our focus was at the outset. And then the second phase of that was the external campaign, right? So it's like to get this out to the community, like, Hey, we do this as well. So when people were doing their talks in, uh, churches and in the rotary clubs and in the community centers and all these things to make sure that the people who were giving those talks would incorporate the teen mentoring program on the flyers, on the brochures, on the website. They did all these things to externally, get that message out there. So you can kind of think about it like that. I think, um. Think about the phases that make sense. Think about the key stakeholders. If you have specific people that you're looking to turn, if there's some key people, like, man, here's some, leverage points. Take that in the right way. I'm not trying to like leverage or manipulate people in a bad way, but if, you know, hey, if I get this person on board, if I get this person on board, the whole team is gonna come around. Okay. If I get like the managers of this group, like the ops managers who are talking to the rank and file folks day to day, if I get them on board and if I get them bought in and if I let them know, Hey, this is a big change and it might seem scary, but really we're trying to do this, this, and this, and here's all this stuff to, to show you, we're trying to do this, this, and this. Once you get the managers on board, then everything's gonna start turning around naturally. So you can think about those leverage points like that. Okay, so hopefully this has been helpful around changing the narrative and trying to win hearts and minds and turn the people and culture. Um, and TI, I'm assuming that you're gonna add some sass to your message, so it might be a sassy internal message or have a little bit of an edge to it, which is not necessarily a bad thing at all. But hopefully you have something in here you can take and apply. To your effort within your company. But thank you so much for submitting your question and if anyone else has a question they would like answered, then feel free to drop that in the comments. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can send me an email at Emily at Next level Coach And I always love getting these questions and I always love hearing what's top of mind for people, and I will absolutely help and answer any way I can. So with that, I will catch you next week on leveraging Leadership. I.

11:51

This episode is brought to you by Next Level Coaching. If you or anyone you know would like to learn more about executive leadership coaching, please visit www.next level Coach.