Communications Elevated

Date:
October 15, 2026
8:00 AM MDT - 6:00 PM MDT
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Location:
Lowry Conference Center
1061 Akron Way
Denver, CO 80230
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Communications Elevated is IABC Colorado’s first full-day conference designed to bring communicators together for learning, connection, and practical insight that elevates our work.

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Why attend?

Communicators are navigating constant change, new tools, evolving expectations, and increasing demands for clarity and impact.

Communications Elevated is being built to help you:

• Strengthen your skills and confidence
• Learn from experienced practitioners
• Connect with peers across communications disciplines
• Walk away with insights you can immediately apply

Whether you work in internal communications, PR, marketing, or a related field, this conference is designed to meet you where you are and elevate your skills.

***subject to change***

08:00 AM - 08:45 AM

Registration/Breakfast

08:45 AM - 09:45 AM

Keynote - Elevating Satisfaction

Dr. Erika Michalski

Learn what Mick Jagger and Keith Richards didn’t realize about satisfaction. Turns out you CAN get it…if you know how. In this keynote, Dr. Erika marries research from the fields of neuroscience, positive psychology, and emotional intelligence as it invites you to consider how you are cultivating your own sense of satisfaction in both your personal and professional life. Anchored in content intended for practical and immediate application, and balanced with humor, this high-energy session will leave you with a fresh perspective about satisfaction along with a collection of new thoughts about bubbles and broccoli.

10:00 AM - 10:45 AM

How to Get Better at Hard Conversations: Turning Tension into Trust

Gabriel DeRita

The quality of our relationships determines our outcomes in business and in life. The core skills that can make or break those relationships are about how we show up, how we communicate, and how we respond to others.

Whether it’s delivering a tough performance review or navigating interpersonal conflict on your team, hard conversations are part of nearly every job. But just because they’re common doesn’t make them easy. Many of us avoid them, delay them, or handle them in ways that erode trust — often without realizing it.

In this interactive session, you’ll learn a practical framework for navigating high-stakes conversations with clarity, confidence, and care. Rooted in simple practices backed by decades of research, this session gives you tools to strengthen psychological safety and build deeper trust — even in moments of discomfort.

You’ll learn and practice five critical steps for giving and receiving feedback with clarity and grace, giving you a concrete process you can apply to your next tough conversation.

You’ll learn how to:

• Practice a step-by-step approach for both giving and receiving hard feedback.
• Learn four effective reasons to embrace relational tension and frame hard conversations for shared success.
• Understand the foundations of relational intelligence that build the foundations of trust and connection needed to navigate challenging moments with grace.

 

10:00 AM - 10:45 AM

How to Build an AI-Ready Social Strategy That Shows Up, Stands Out and Scales

Brent Bowen

AI now powers many of the feeds your audiences engage with — but too often, social leaders are stuck with inherited, legacy, or half-baked strategies that don’t scale or stand up to scrutiny. The result: fragmented workflows, content that feels generic, and a constant fight to prove real business value.

Most GEO and AI search responsibilities default to digital marketing and SEO teams — leaving content marketers, social media managers, and marketing communicators out of the conversation entirely. This session changes that.

Brent Bowen, founder of Sparkcade Marketing and host of the CultivatED Marketer podcast, will show communications and social leaders how to integrate Generative Engine Optimization, social search, and AI workflows into a cohesive, scalable social strategy — one that allows content and social leaders to guide how brands show up in AI-driven search and discovery.

Participants will leave with a practical AI playbook covering discoverability, engagement, and authenticity in a landscape flooded with AI-generated content. The session includes examples of best-in-class social strategy playbooks, frameworks for text, image, and video prompting, a real-world case study, and a hands-on AI stress test of a recent campaign.

You’ll learn how to:

• Understand how Generative Engine Optimization and platform-native social search work together — and how communicators can take an active role in shaping brand discoverability.
• Apply advanced AI prompting frameworks for text, image, and video while preserving brand voice, authenticity, and audience trust.
• Evaluate a social strategy or campaign using an AI stress test to identify gaps in discoverability, engagement, and brand safety.
• Develop practical brand guardrails that balance speed, compliance, and creativity.

 

10:00 AM - 10:45 AM

Nobody Wants to Read This: How to Combine Journalism, Research, and Change Communication to Help Employees Care About the Comms They’d Rather Ignore

Amanda Swennes

Nobody wakes up excited to read about payroll changes, pay transparency, compliance, benefits and compensation policy, or an ERP implementation. Yet communicators are routinely asked to help employees understand — and act on — these complex, business-critical topics, often with very little background.

So we do what communicators often do: rewrite, simplify, shorten, add graphics, make it more engaging. But what if the real problem isn’t the writing? What if it starts much earlier?

Drawing on more than 20 years spanning journalism, research, change management, and internal communications, this session introduces a practical framework for solving these communication problems before you write a single word. You’ll learn to Think Like a Researcher to uncover audience needs, Think Like a Journalist to find the story employees actually need to hear, and Think Like a Change Communicator to help people understand what the change means and what they need to do.

Through real examples from Total Rewards, enterprise technology, and regulatory change, you’ll leave with practical tools for communicating complex topics with greater clarity, relevance, and impact — and a repeatable framework you can apply immediately.

You’ll learn how to:

• Apply a three-part framework to communicate complex business topics more clearly and effectively.
• Use research and audience insights to identify knowledge gaps, challenge assumptions, and focus messages on what employees truly need to know.
• Apply storytelling techniques to uncover the narrative that makes technical or regulated topics more relevant and meaningful.
• Develop communications that reduce uncertainty, build trust, and help employees understand what they need to know and do to be successful.

10:45 AM - 11:30 AM

Networking Bingo + Headshots
 

11:30 AM - 12:15 PM

Lunch Break
 

12:15 PM - 01:30 PM

Keynote: From Unknown to In-Demand: How strategic communication can build an employer brand, earn trust and drive business results

Michael Ambrozewicz

What happens when a company needs to hire hundreds of experienced technology professionals in one of the world’s most competitive talent markets — but almost no one there knows who you are?

Rather than treating employer branding as a recruiting campaign, the team approached it as a strategic communications and reputation challenge — one that could not only attract talent, but also help define the culture and employee experience of a new organization.

The result was an integrated program built on audience insight, distinctive positioning, visible leadership, authentic storytelling, and measurable business outcomes — ultimately earning an IABC Gold Quill Award.

This session will take attendees behind the strategy to explore what worked, what the team learned, and how employer brand can strengthen reputation, shape culture, and create a more intentional employee experience.

 

01:45 PM - 02:30 PM

From Panic to Plan: Why Crisis Communications is Critical

Patricia Billinger

Every communicator will face a crisis. While emergencies can’t always be predicted or prevented, preparation can help communicators reduce risk, communicate effectively, and bring order to chaos faster.

Drawing on more than 20 years of experience in crisis, executive, internal, and strategic communications, Patricia Billinger will share practical tips and best practices for communicating through crises ranging from reputational risks to physical threats. Her experience includes serving as a national disaster spokesperson for the American Red Cross and leading the State of Colorado’s joint information center during the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Participants will leave with practical ideas for preparing before a crisis hits and communicating with greater clarity and confidence when it does.

You’ll learn how to:

• Prepare for crises before they happen.
• Reduce communications risk and respond more effectively under pressure.
• Apply practical crisis communications best practices across reputational and physical threats.

 

01:45 PM - 02:30 PM

The New Physics of Influence: Communicating in an AI-Mediated Reality

Elizabeth Edwards

An intelligence layer now sits between your organization and every audience you serve, continuously shaping what the world believes about you. Most communication teams are still managing reputation in the media layer while losing ground in the layer that increasingly shapes first impressions, due diligence, and decisions.

Elizabeth Edwards has spent 25 years studying the science of how people actually form judgments and has been advising AI companies since the 1990s. In this session, she brings both together: why audiences accept or reject what we say based on emotion and instinct rather than facts alone, why AI is the first technology to read and reproduce those human patterns at scale, and why that combination rewrites what communication leadership means.

Attendees will leave knowing what questions to ask about their own organization’s presence in the AI layer — and why communicators, not technologists, are the ones equipped to lead this work.

You’ll explore how to:

• Recognize why communication is now one of the most consequential seats in the company. Every AI your organization deploys, every answer an AI gives about your brand, and every synthesis shaping how employees, investors, and customers perceive you is part of the communication architecture being authored right now.
• Step into the role of signal architect. The job is no longer simply producing messages and placing them in channels. It is designing the total signal an organization emits — every statement, every structure, every silence — for both human audiences and machine readers.
• Own the sensemaking relationship between the business and its world. Audiences increasingly assemble reality from the signals available, through both human instinct and machine synthesis. Communicators now stand at that assembly point.
• Leave with the mandate — and the language to claim it. Participants will leave with the strategic case for this architectural role, questions that reveal where their organization is exposed in the intelligence layer, and vocabulary to reposition communications as a discipline that helps determine what the world believes about the company.

 

01:45 PM - 02:30 PM

Invisible Labor, Visible Proof: Elevating the Work of Internal Communicators

Alyssa Towns

Internal communicators do work that’s rarely easy to quantify: reading a room and changing course, knowing when not to send something, helping leaders confront misalignment among themselves, and managing relationships that keep an organization’s trust intact. It’s some of the most important and often overlooked work of successful internal communicators.

In this session, participants will name and categorize their own invisible labor using a practical framework, then work in small groups to recognize this work in one another — a moment that too many solo internal communicators and small IC teams never get.

The session closes with a tool to track this labor over time and language for discussing it with managers and senior leaders, so the work stops being invisible by default.

You’ll learn how to:

• Identify and categorize the different forms of invisible labor internal communicators perform using a shared framework.
• Practice recognizing and naming this labor through structured small-group discussion.
• Use a personal tracking tool to document invisible labor over time.
• Develop language and talking points for communicating this work’s value to managers and senior leaders.

 

02:30 PM - 03:00 PM

Networking Break/Afternoon Snack

03:00 PM - 03:45 PM

The Human Advantage: Communication When Everyone Has AI

Susan Abbott

Artificial intelligence is transforming every aspect of the communications profession. As AI becomes commonplace, the real competitive advantage will no longer be producing more content faster — it will be building trust, exercising sound judgment, communicating with empathy, and helping organizations navigate complexity.

This interactive session explores what it means to be an effective communicator when everyone has access to AI. Drawing on real-world examples, participants will examine how AI is reshaping expectations of communicators and why the profession’s most valuable skills are becoming increasingly human.

Rather than focusing on AI tools or prompt engineering, the session introduces a practical framework for balancing efficiency with authenticity, automation with accountability, and innovation with trust. Attendees will explore how to elevate their role from content producers to strategic advisors and use AI more intentionally while strengthening credibility and stakeholder trust.

You’ll learn how to:

• Identify the uniquely human capabilities — including trust, judgment, empathy, and ethical decision-making — that become more valuable as AI becomes embedded in communications work.
• Evaluate where AI can enhance communication workflows and where human expertise remains essential.
• Apply a practical framework for using AI responsibly while maintaining authenticity, transparency, and trust.

 

03:00 PM - 03:45 PM

To Be Announced

TBA

 

03:00 PM - 03:45 PM

To Be Announced

TBA
 

03:45 PM - 04:15 PM

Closing Session
 

04:30 PM - 06:00 PM

Networking Happy Hour

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