Be the spark that helps others shine

When Fred Hutch, UW Medicine, & Seattle Children's came to the table to articulate how they might reimage the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, the leaders needed someone who could help bring all of their unique visions and points of view together in one cohesive voice.  They turned to Will to facilitate a series of messaging workshops where the leadership from each organization could be heard.  In turn, Will worked with the group to help them collectively develop a single shared articulation which rebranded the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance into Fred Hutch Cancer  Center at UW.  The project took place over several years.  Ultimately, Will understood that to get each party to embrace a collective vision, they needed to co-create the messaging.

The business and theater worlds seldom collide. If they do, it is often through patronage, such as a corporate donation, not partnership.   When Will saw his favorite theatre company suffering financially, he approached the artistic director with an idea -- could a strategic partnership between his firm and the Tony Award-winning Intiman Theatre be good for his clients and employees, as well as Intiman itself?

The Creative Cooperative was designed as an opportunity to explore that very question. By supporting an acclaimed local arts organization, and in partnership with it, Edelman employees and select clients took an inside look at storytelling through the perspective of artists who know it best.

The agency showed a new dimension to storytelling and Intiman had what would become its largest earned revenue stream.

When Will was leading the Northwest offices of Edelman, he faced an industrywide challenge  -- why weren't the agency's account teams as diverse as the target customers they were trying to reach on behalf of bluechip clients like Microsoft, Starbucks and REI?

Upon doing some research, he  realized that the challenge really began at the college level, where fewer diverse students were choosing public relations as a field of study.  He worked with the Edward R. Murrow College of Communications at Washington State University to develop Edelman's first internship program designed to reach rising seniors with diverse backgrounds -- Prism Scholars.  By focusing on rising seniors, the interns not only participated in the summer program, they went back to school as advocates for public relations as a field of study.  Over the course of the first couple of years, the Prism Scholars program hosted interns from universities all along the West Coast -- from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Eugene, Portland and Seattle.  Members of the internship program even came back after graduation to work at Edelman as well as other agencies throughout the region.

On March 4, 2020, when Seattle was at the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak,  the UW Medicine CMO faced the daunting task of standing up the communications function for the Unified Command Response team.  Because of his crisis training and experience in working in the incident command model developed by the US Coast Guard, Will Ludlam was asked to step in and serve as the public information officer for the COVID-19 Unified Command for UW Medicine.  In that role, Will served as the senior communications advisor to the UW Medicine executive team, providing messaging used to communicate news about the virus to staff, patients, and the broader Puget Sound community.  

Because information was changing in real time and medical staff members were being asked to modify medical protocols that had long been established, it was critical that the messages being delivered instilled trust and confidence in UW Medicine leadership.

This award-winning work set the standard for how other health systems would respond to the public health crisis.