When I started at the Society for Simulation in Healthcare in 2019, one of the first things I built wasn’t a content calendar or a brand guide. It was a weekly call rotation with every department.
Nobody asked me to do it, and it wasn’t in my job description. It didn’t produce anything a leadership team could point to in a budget conversation. And, even if I don’t have a structured call every single week now almost eight years later, the reason behind it mattered then (and still matters now) more than the structure, and it shaped everything about how my work actually functions inside the organization.
I’m not there to collect content requests. I’m not there to report on campaign performance. Much like I did in board rooms, I want to know the discussion that leads to the “why” that leads to the “what.”
What It Is and What It Isn’t
It’s pretty simple — a rotating, weekly department-to-department group call with membership, education, accreditation, certification, events, and the executive office. No official standing agenda. A conversation. Mostly informal, where I listen more than talk, and when I talk, it’s a question.
What it isn’t: a marketing intake process. I’m not there to collect content requests. I’m not there to report on campaign performance. Much like I did in board rooms, I want to know the discussion that leads to the “why” that leads to the “what.”
I’m there to understand what’s happening at the ground level in each part of the organization before it becomes structured, before it reaches leadership, before it gets translated into something formal enough for a meeting agenda.
That distinction matters. If I position these calls as only a content intake process, all they produce is a request queue. Positioned as relationship and intelligence calls, they produce something much more useful. Sometimes it’s an early warning system to potential obstacles. Maybe it’s guiding a shared vocabulary and thought process across departments — because I’m hearing from all of them — that makes every later downstream communication effort easier.
Because I can speak every department’s language.
What It Actually Produces
The most valuable thing these calls produce isn’t content. It’s context I can’t get any other way.
I find out that the credentialing team is seeing a specific question come up repeatedly from candidates before it becomes a member complaint or a social media post. I find out that a program is being restructured in ways that will affect member communications before the announcement is drafted. I find out that a staff member in another department is quietly managing a difficult vendor relationship that may affect a conference before it becomes a crisis I’m communicating around rather than ahead of.
You probably have other similar examples of intel that proved very useful in your own work.
None of that intelligence gets captured in a meeting minutes document. None of it shows up in a weekly status report. It exists in the informal — but intentional — layer of organizational life that most communications functions never access because they’re too downstream to hear it before it becomes official.
It’s not always negative, either, by the way.
I also find out what’s working — what members are saying directly to program staff, what’s generating enthusiasm internally, what a department head is most proud of that hasn’t been told publicly yet. That’s the raw material for some of the strongest content the organization produces, and it comes from a relationship, not a content brief.
What It Does for Organizational Positioning
There’s a second thing these calls do that took me longer to fully appreciate. They change how other departments see marketing’s role.
A marketing function that shows up when something needs to be promoted is a service department. A marketing function that shows up every week, that knows what’s happening before it needs to be promoted, that asks questions about organizational goals rather than content needs — that function gets pulled into conversations earlier. Not because it asked to be, but because the relationship has established that earlier involvement produces better outcomes.
And, as we discuss things here, let’s absolutely not forget what it’s also building between marketing and each department:
Trust.
That upstream positioning doesn’t happen through a reorganization or a leadership mandate. It happens through accumulated trust built in exactly the kind of low-stakes, informal, relationship-first interactions that a weekly call rotation creates. I’m not sure there’s a faster path to it, though I hold that loosely — the organizations and cultures I’ve worked in may not represent every context.
Why I’d Do It Again Anywhere
I brought this system from NAA to SSH, and I’d build it in any organization I lead. Not because it’s the only way to stay connected to what’s happening across departments, but because it’s the most reliable one I’ve found for a communications function that needs to operate with organizational intelligence rather than just departmental directives.
The structure is simple. The discipline of maintaining it is less simple — there are weeks where it feels like overhead, where the calls don’t produce anything immediately useful, where it would be easy to let them slide in favor of production work. That’s usually when I’m most glad I didn’t, because the call I almost cancelled is often the one where I hear something I needed to know before I needed to know it. (That said, do I now have the calls with every department every week? No. But, do I have the ability — and desire — to reach out to staff when I just want to chat? Yes.)
I don’t think this system works the same way in every organization. Some cultures won’t support it. Some departments won’t engage authentically in that format. Some leadership teams won’t see the value in time that doesn’t produce a visible deliverable. Those are real constraints, and I’m not dismissing them. I’m just very thankful for an environment where we’re allowed to manage our day-to-day activities in ways we feel best support our work.
What I’d say is that if the culture supports it and the leadership is open to it, building that informal intelligence infrastructure early — before you need it, before a crisis makes it urgent — is one of the highest-leverage investments a communications leader can make in the first months at a new organization.
The ROI doesn’t show up on a campaign report. It shows up in literally everything.
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