Today we’d like to introduce you to Carolyn Will.
Hi Carolyn, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
My first job out of college was as an agricultural TV reporter covering central Minnesota. My first on-air experience was delivering the noon farm commodities report. Then I hustled out of the anchor chair, shot a field report, came back and edited it, and was back in the anchor chair for the 10 p.m. news. After the news, I had to climb a ladder from the control room up to the TV station’s roof to turn the satellite dishes to record national news feeds. Those were the old days!! I went on to work primarily in health and medical news as a TV producer for ABC affiliates and nationally on PBS and Discovery Health.
After having my second child, I focused on finishing my Master’s in Business Communications, and then opened my boutique PR agency, CW Marketing & Communications. I enjoy solving problems for my clients — connecting the dots between their business and target audiences, employees, or constituents. In addition to media relations and strategic communications planning, I have produced many large-scale events, and it’s there that I believe my TV background has helped me.
Most recently, I pulled all my experiences together to run for the Saint Paul City Council. While I finished second out of four candidates, I believe I brought renewed attention to issues that I care deeply about.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I am an eternal optimist who does not dwell on the bumps along the way. However, I hit a few, of course! I was a single parent for many years. Thankfully, I had a brother who could help me with picking up my daughter from after-school care on evenings when I had a 4-midnight edit shift or an evening shoot. I also encountered a lot of bias when I tried to rent apartments as a single mother. I was astounded by this, and you don’t know what you haven’t experienced. I started a campaign in all of my circles to stop using the term “single mother” and replace it with single parent as the connotations are so negative for the mother, which is unfair.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
CW Marketing & Communications is a boutique public relations agency specializing in strategic communications and media relations. We consider ourselves part journalist, part storyteller, and part communications counselor. We combine these experiences to deliver high-impact PR. We help clients solve problems, drive change, and reach their objectives.
What sets us apart is that we are unafraid of large-scale projects, big campaigns, and high expectations. But we also give our full effort to the small, one-off projects. We’re small, and we never like to be underestimated, and that attitude carries through in all our work.
I take pride in our creative solutions and strategic partnerships we’ve brokered for our clients. Last summer, we unveiled a large window gallery in a vacant storefront in one of our city’s busiest shopping districts. The gallery displayed a 30-year timeline of costumes (46 mannequins!) for Circus Juventas and its owners, who had performed with the Flying Wallendas and Ringling Brothers. The property owners liked it so much they extended the display for three months, and it was essentially free advertising for the nonprofit performing arts circus school.
For the Cathedral of Saint Paul during the height of the COVID lockdown, I brought the North American debut of the Luxmuralis immersive light-and-sound show, one of the first of its kind. I arranged to display the 11-minute show on the Cathedral’s expansive facade. We arranged it as a “drive-in” experience, with cars parked at an angle to watch the show. It entailed routing traffic along certain streets, using a lot of social media to communicate, and, of course, livestreaming it all three nights, with thousands watching! Projects that raise our client’s profile in a profoundly positive way bring great satisfaction.
Risk taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
I took a leave of absence from my anchoring/reporting position at WDIO-TV in Duluth, Minnesota, when I was 25 years old, to travel around the world with two teachers setting up a school program. They wanted a documentarian, someone who would shoot video and take photos of them as they visited the schools and cities that were signing on to their program. Starting in Tokyo, traveling all the way down Southeast Asia to Jakarta, Indonesia, then heading west to Malaysia, Thailand, etc. It was exotic and eye-opening. That was a considerable risk. Some may think it wasn’t as risky, given that I was starting my career. I elected to stay with the teachers for the whole “round the world” trip, so I did have to give up my anchor position. My news director had told me I had to return after six weeks to retain the anchor chair, but we had only just arrived in Europe at that point, and I didn’t want to miss East Berlin, so I said, “Find someone else.”
And this year, I took another pause in my professional work to give a run for public office a try. Another risk, but calculated. As I tell my clients, sharing your values is the key to branding. I figured that as long as I remained true to my values, the campaign might at least help brand my name and business.
Outside of business, I say I am NOT a risk-taker and think of myself more as an adventure-seeker.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.cwcommunications.info/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/irishmoxiepr/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CWMarketingCommunications/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolynmwill/
- Twitter: https://x.com/CWCommunication
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@carolynwill3818/featured
