What's in the newsletter this week?

On January 15, we kicked off our weekly workshop series for people who wanted to put the Data-Driven Communications framework into action.

We called the first four sessions "the DDC Activation Series." We brought a different expert guest speaker each week, covered a different skill, made it practical, and then handed out badges for people who passed the quiz.

It started with a bang! Within a few weeks we had 230 people registered, and 90 people joined the first session live, and a bunch more watched the recording after.

But then registration numbers plateaued, and the live attendee count dipped.

I felt like a spin class instructor who couldn't fill the room. I'd show up at 8am, Thursday after Thursday, with my full energy, and I'd look around the Zoom and think — am I doing something wrong? Is this not landing? Should I pull the plug?

I was looking at declining stats and a crazy upcoming travel schedule. All my colleagues (and some of the experts) said that this weekly pace was too insane to sustain, and since I was about to hit the road for a month, I should probably focus my energy on other things.

The data was telling me to pivot and pause.

But sometimes, you gotta say f**k the data. 🙂

My colleagues weren't wrong. The workload was hefty and it was no walk in the park each week.

But I could see something was happening. Because I noticed certain people showing up week after week.

Even though the attendee size stabilized at a solid 25 per week, I noticed certain people in the crowd.

Some never missed a session. Others brought colleagues and friends. Certain people were very vocal in the chat and asked brilliant questions.

And then the emails started.

Not the kind of email to proclaim "I made it, thanks to you."

No, these were different. These emails were enthusiastic and humble. Energizing but realistic.

"I tried what you said about the North Star and here's what happened."
"My team did the assessment, here's what we learned about ourselves."
"This made me think about my role differently."
"I want to be one of the 1,000 communicators you transform into a trusted advisor."

Even though the numbers said it wasn't "working," the direct signals from my small audience were telling me something was shifting.

But there was something special about two of the people who showed up each week.

They were with me way before Run Club started. Way before we hired "Marketer Marisa" to professionalize the program. Way before I teamed up with Evan Escobedo and Sam Knowles to create the Activations Series and started handing out badges.

They reminded me of what it's like when you discover a band before they get signed by a label — before the production is polished, when they're just strumming the guitar in a small cafe.

Devin Reed told me this would happen. He calls these people your Day One crowd.

Megan works at GE Appliances. She was introduced to the DDC framework by my colleague Samantha early in 2025, back when the program was officially just a maturity model and an assessment.

Megan was trying to up-level her team's measurement framework, and the DDC gave her a diagnostic to understand where to begin, what to leverage, and what to fix.

She liked it so much she brought her CCO into the conversation. He was very sharp, and he liked the concept too. But he quickly wrote it off. He said something like — I like this stuff, but it's not going to work. I think it's going to take more than this to change the culture of the comms team.

He wasn't being dismissive — he was being honest. And he was 100% right. He'd been around long enough to know that bringing in an outsider doesn't easily change the culture of a team.

But here's what he missed.

He didn't need an outsider to change his team's culture. He needed an insider. And he didn't know he already had one.

When I started Run Club, Megan showed up every week. She earned all four badges in the Activation Series. And somewhere along the way, something shifted in how she approached her work.

She sent me an email a few weeks ago. She'd started a project, and instead of opening with output metrics, she opened with the business outcome the work was tied to. The North Star reframed the conversation. And she said: doors started opening. People wanted to collaborate. Teams that hadn't taken comms seriously started inviting her in.

That's not a tool change. That's a confidence change.

Her chief comms officer wanted to transform his team. He couldn't do it from his seat. Megan is doing it from hers. And mark my words — that team's culture is going to look different a year from now, and most of them won't know exactly when it happened.

Aisha runs a PR agency in Puerto Rico. They do work that would impress anyone — major cosmetics brands, celebrity collaborations, including a campaign for a cosmetics brand with Bad Bunny.

She's good at what she does. But here's what she'll openly tell you: she doesn't see herself as a communicator because her background is engineering.

Last summer, she took the DDC maturity assessment, and just like most other people, she was at level 2 — Planner. Then she asked for a consultation, which I offer free to all Meltwater clients and anyone who takes the assessment.

The moment we got on the zoom, I could tell she wasn't there for vanity. She wasn't trying to make herself look good. She was there because she cared about her team — their careers, their development, whether the work they were doing actually meant something.

So I ran a workshop for her team. They all leaned in and took the assessment together. They really got into it.

A few months later, she posted on LinkedIn. She tagged me. She announced a new offering she'd built — and she was telling the world she was calling her shot.

Then she and her team started showing up to Run Club. And they kept showing up.

What I respect most about Aisha is that she has zero ego in this work. She understands something most leaders forget: the job of a leader isn't always to be out front and the face of the work. It's to make sure your team has the tools, the skills, and the resources to do their best work — so the clients succeed. Because at the end of the day, if the client doesn't win, none of the metrics matter.

Aisha doesn't need a framework to tell her that. She knew it already. What the framework gave her was language, structure, and a way to articulate what she was already striving for — so her team could see it, replicate it, and run with it.

Genevieve Brammall (Head of PR, News Corp Australia) and Stephanie Lerdall (Director of Communications, Morningstar) co-host Earning Your Seat with me. By the time we'd recorded eleven episodes together, both of their confidence had shifted in a way I could see and hear for myself. Gen will tell you herself — she became more intentional. Steph found her edge.

It wasn't the podcast that did it. It was the act of articulating, week after week, what they actually believed about this work. The framework gave them a reference point.

Gen and Steph transformed through the podcast. Megan and Aisha transformed by leaning into Run Club.

The thing I almost missed — the thing that almost made me pull the plug — is this:

People don't actually need the “framework.” They need the confidence to know that what they're doing isn't an experiment. That it's not a random dart throw in the dark. That they have their own system.

That's it. That's the whole thing.

This is exactly what I'm teaching with the DDC framework: don't measure your activity. Measure your ability to change what they know, what they feel, and what they do.

I almost forgot to apply it to myself. The numbers didn’t look good quantitatively. But qualitatively, a shift was happening, and that was the goal all along!

Communicators are some of the most thoughtful, capable people in any organization. What they don't always have is the confidence that the way they're approaching the work is legitimate — that it can be defended, measured, scaled, and respected.

The DDC framework gives them that. Run Club gives them that. The badges give them that. The community gives them that.

Not because any of those things are magic, but because once you know you have a system underneath you, you stop apologizing for your work. You start calling your shots. You start cracking open doors that used to be closed.

And once that shift happens — the team around you starts to feel it. The CCO who didn't believe culture could change starts seeing it change. The agency client who hired you for a campaign starts treating you like a strategic partner.

Not because you found a new framework. Because you found your footing.

I'm still on a mission to get a thousand people through this transformation. We're not there yet. We only have 290 people registered for Run Club, and only about 25 to 30 show up every week.

But I'm no longer measuring success based on attendance.

Because Megan is going to do something even her CCO thought was too difficult. Aisha is going to build an agency that runs differently from any agency in her market. Gen and Steph are going to keep raising the standard for what this work looks like at the highest levels. And the rest of the 25 — the ones I haven't named here, the ones whose stories I haven't told yet — they're doing their own version of the same thing.

That's not a community. That's a movement.

And it doesn't need a thousand people to be real. It just needs the right ones to keep showing up.

So thank you to Megan, to Aisha and to the 25-ish people who chime in every Thursday and the people who lurk silently, and the people who took the assessment and never came back but still email me a year later to say something I wrote made them think differently.

You're the reason I didn't pull the plug.

I'll see you Thursday.

— Dino