Raising Your Boss’s Profile: What’s Your Advice?

Here’s a challenge that several nonprofit communicators have asked me about recently: How do I raise the national visibility of my boss on our issues?

This is something we’ll cover in our new webinar on May 20, Thought Leadership for Nonprofits: Marketing to Build Your Authority and Share Expertise. But let’s work on it here too.

Let’s say your situation is something like this (which is a composite of the real situations I’ve heard about recently):

• Your boss is a super smart, visionary person.
• She’s been working in the field for more than 20 years, but in a regional (big city, occasionally multi-state, but not national) capacity.
• She likes the idea of being published, but can’t make the time to write (and honestly, she is not the most fabulous writer anyway).
• She’s already on the regional and national trade conference speaking circuit in your sector.
• Your issues are starting to appear in national mainstream media. Your boss is seeing all of that coverage and asking you about how to get your organization’s name in the mix (and by default, hers).
• You are a typical full-time communications director — you have all the usual communications channels at your disposal, but you are super busy already.
• Right now, your boss is just asking you about national press coverage, but you and she know that there are likely to be more high-visibility opportunities in the future (e.g. Congressional hearings, perhaps some celebrity work on your issues).

Where do you begin? What might work well? Anything you would avoid? Let’s talk about the options in the comments.