The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Chip Griffin: Welcome to another episode of the Chats with Chip podcast. I’m your host, Chip Griffin, the founder of SAGA, the Small Agency Growth Alliance, and I’m delighted to have with me Rachel Sales of Enunciate. Welcome to the show, Rachel.

Rachel Sales: Hi. Thank you.

Chip Griffin: So Rachel, you’ve got a, a, a PR agency based out of New York.

 But why don’t you, share a little bit about yourself with our listeners, and then we’ll, we’ll dive into the topic at hand today.

Rachel Sales: Sure. Thank you for having me. So Enunciate is a boutique marketing and PR agency that specifically focuses on content strategy and content creation. And we work with mission-driven organizations of many different industries all over the world to tell their stories and amplify their impact.

Chip Griffin: That is very succinct. I love it. So, today I thought we would talk about, you know, people realize I think that we are in kind of a chaotic communications environment today in a chaotic world, frankly. And so, one of the things that, that I’ve talked about on a lot of my shows is, you know, how we can navigate that as agencies from a business development perspective, but we haven’t talked about it so much from the perspective of.

How do we help our clients get through these times? And so I think that would be a good place for us to get started today. And, and thinking about the work that you’re doing with your clients and, and how do you help them to think about this chaotic environment and, and what, how does that influence the advice that you’re giving to help them get through it?

Rachel Sales: Yeah, thank you. So I will say that working in marketing and pr, our job has always been to find how our client’s story connects to the news, right? Like make it timely, make it relevant, what’s going on. They have a product they wanna push, they have partnerships they wanna share, they wanna speak to their audience, right?

If it’s not timely, it’s not gonna cut through the noise. Now we’re actually at a completely different time where we don’t even need to try in some ways, right? We don’t, the news every single day we’re finding is impacting our clients no matter what industry they’re in, right? And we have clients from FinTech to education, nonprofit.

I mean DEI, like it’s a huge fan. And just every single day what’s happening, the news impacts them. So now. There’s two issues. Number one is a human issue, which is we know that our clients are impacted by the news in a lot of different ways every single day. How do we approach them with increased empathy and acknowledge what they’re going through, what they’re experiencing.

It could be good or it could be very bad, right? And then number two, how do we create a strategy that actually defines whether they’re going to comment on the news. Weigh in on the news, acknowledge news, not acknowledge the news. So there, those are kind of like the two things that we’re dealing with every single day with every single one of our clients.

Chip Griffin: Well, let’s start with that second piece first because you know, we hear a lot that, you know, consumers want to hear brands speaking out about the issues of the day. And so there’s, there’s really this been, this drumbeat for probably the last three or four years about, how brands really need to take a more active role in the conversation.

And, and honestly, I’ve consistently pushed back against that. I, I don’t, I, I think that it’s, it’s very much situational and I think the default position should actually be, you generally don’t. Unless it’s impacting you or it’s core to your mission or something like that. But I’m, I’m curious, has that changed and, and how do you see that and how do you work with your clients on that piece of it?

Rachel Sales: So, I think there has been a bit of pushback because there were times, let’s say five years ago when every brand was kind of sharing, okay, we support this cause and then there was cause of, you know, slacktivism, right? Like you have never actually done anything for this cause and now you’re just like putting up a social media visual and saying, I support this while not actually doing anything.

So there has been a lot of pushback and we have to be really, really careful with our clients. Not to get into that, but a lot of our clients actually are leaders in different, you know, in industry leaders, different causes or things that t