AI and the Value of Creativity: A conversation with Jordan Ray

Jordan’s career in Communications has spanned over a decade, working with some of the best and brightest in the public and private sector. He was an early adopter of ChatGPT and other AI tools. So I spoke to him about his curiosity about AI, how he turned that into a training course for Communications professionals, and where he predicts the industry is moving.


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Summer Music Society Named Curious Public’s 2023/24 UPLIFT Recipient

Toronto, Ontario, February 22, 2024 – Curious Public, a leading public affairs firm in the GTHA, announced its partnership with Summer Music Society, a volunteer music education and events program in Port Elgin which will receive pro bono communications and marketing services as part of the firm’s commitment to giving back to the community.


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Death by 5,000 Cuts: More bad news for Canadian media

This time the bad news was Bell, announcing layoffs of nearly 5,000 people, shuttering more media outlets and canceling local newscasts – including the decades-old flagship investigative news program W5 (which will be “repurposed”). And who is to blame? Why, the Feds of course, says Bell.


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Applications Are Now Open for Curious Public’s 2nd Annual James Bullbrook Memorial Scholarship

Toronto, Ontario, January 25, 2024 – Curious Public announced today that applications are open for its second annual James Bullbrook Memorial Scholarship; a $500 US award to be used towards a skateboarding session at Camp Woodward PA, in honour of our late friend and colleague, James Bullbrook. 


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3 Ways to Use Numbers More Effectively in Communications

Numbers don't lie, but numbers don't convince people either - not without a story. Lloyd Rang highlights three tips that communications and marketing professionals can leverage to make the data in presentations, speeches, and articles more effective.


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“Practice, practice, practice!”: Your best defense in a crisis

In our most recent episode of Comms In Question, Anne Marie Aikins asked panelists to talk about the government issues, personnel scandals and emergency response missteps that had Canadian communicators scrambling this year. Shannon Currie captures the top three things Marketing and Communications professionals need to do ahead of a crisis.


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Are We Destroying the Media?

Recently announced cuts to CBC are the latest chapter in Canada's changing media landscape. Jordan Ray writes about why this is happening, what it means and how your organization can adapt.


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What Can Taylor Swift and Star Wars Teach Us About Marketing?

Good storytellers drive market success. But if you’re working on a big, multi-year project with thousands of people and lots of moving parts, or even if you’re part of a big corporate organization, it can be easy to feel like you and your work are disconnected from what your colleagues are doing. You may find yourself halfway through the project asking, “How did I get here?” And, “WHY are we here anyway?”


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Zoe Zollinger Goes to Camp Woodward

In 2023, we launched the annual James Bullbrook Memorial Scholarship, providing 500 USD to a skater residing in Canada to attend Woodward PA. In our first year, that deserving skater was 16 year old Zoe Zollinger from Nanaimo BC. We loved getting to know Zoe through the application process, and I was thrilled to catch up with Zoe and her mom, Melissa, to hear how it went.


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“Be Impeccable”: Advice against ‘greenwashing’

That was the advice given to professional communicators by Sarah Petrevan, VP of Sustainability for the Cement Association of Canada, in our most recent episode of Comms In Question: Greenwashing is ending. Are companies ready? Lloyd Rang hosted our webinar and asked our panel of experts for their insights into Comms professionals’ role in reducing ‘greenwashing.’


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Your Three Priorities for Learning and Development

Canadian organizations — and their leaders — must find a way to meaningfully pass on institutional knowledge and build the younger generations’ skills over the next few years — recession or not. We've been thinking about the three focus areas leaders will want to emphasize in their organization’s learning and development strategies for the remainder of 2023 and early 2024.


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UPLIFT, The Post-Trump World, and the Power of Words: A Conversation with Tracey Sobers

I spoke to Tracey about how she has led our agency’s initiative, UPLIFT, which gives no-cost marketing and communications support to Canadian nonprofits. But we also talked about why our work matters, and how words can drive good or be weaponized for political gain.


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Trauma-Informed Crisis Communications: 5 Lessons from the 2013 Flood

It's been ten years since torrential rains submerged a commuter GO train on the Don Valley tracks, trapping 1,400 GO customers for hours. Former Metrolinx crisis communications and media spokesperson Anne Marie Aikins shares lessons from that night and how a trauma-informed approach to your crisis communications can save your customers, staff, and reputation when things go wrong.


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Curious Public Grows to Help Businesses Drive Results Amid Dynamic Market

Toronto, Ontario, June 12, 2023 – Curious Public Content and Insights has enlisted the expertise of Anne Marie Aikins, Executive Consultant specializing in Public Relations, Crisis Communications and Media, and Jo Henderson, Executive Consultant, specializing in Organizational Strategy and Effectiveness, to help clients drive results. 


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Budget Day: The story behind the numbers

Last month, the Provincial and Federal governments recently got the chance to strike out a day on their calendars that was no doubt circled in red – Budget day. 

Over the last week, both Ontario’s Finance Minister, Peter Bethlenfalvy and Canada’s Finance Minister, Chrystia Freeland delivered their government’s budget, which is less of an exercise in explaining dollars and cents and more of a communications exercise in delivering the story of how each government envisions our future. 


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News Release: Curious Public Creates Advisory Board to Guide Global Growth

Curious Public Content and Insights has enlisted the expertise of a six-member advisory board to help guide it into a new era of growth in Canada, the US and the UK. Curious Public’s advisory board includes deep expertise in tech, leadership, entrepreneurship, and consulting. There is also a geographic component, with members whose networks and experience represent Canada, the US, and the UK. The board will meet twice annually and be available throughout the two-year term for networking, strategic planning, and advice.


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Putting an Ethical Lens on Storytelling: Insights from our experts

Whose stories are you telling? And how are you telling them ethically? Senior writer and consultant Shannon Currie, recaps what our panel of leading experts had to say on ethical storytelling that every comms professional needs to hear.


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Stop Getting Distracted, Start Getting Strategic: Social media management tips for SMBs and non-profits

Curious Public's digital strategist, Emma Earley, highlights three key factors for SMBs and non-profits to use when evaluating where their brand should be - or not be - in the digital landscape.


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Curious Public Assembles More Partners to Better Serve Clients

Toronto, Ontario, February 14, 2023 – Curious Public Content and Insights announced today that it has entered into formal referral agreements with four more leading, independent firms who can help bring unique skills to support Curious Public’s growing roster of global clients.


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Calling All Leaders: It’s time to rally your people

It's a new year that feels more like a new reality. What should you say to your people as we move deeper into 2023? The Curious team unpacks 3 best practices you need to use in your internal communications this year.


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A Skateboard Camp Scholarship in Memory of James Bullbrook

January 26 is an important day. One year ago, James, our friend and colleague of many years passed away. When loss touches us, it kicks off “the year of firsts.” The first birthday without them. The first Christmas. On the last day of this year of firsts, our Curious Public team is putting its love and energy for James into a new “first”: The James Bullbrook Memorial Scholarship. We wanted to do something that honours James for how we got to know him best: as a devoted dad. 


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Curious Public Launches James Bullbrook Memorial Scholarship

Curious Public announced today that applications are open for its first annual James Bullbrook Memorial Scholarship; a $500 US award to be used towards a skateboarding session at Camp Woodward PA, in honour of our late friend and colleague, James Bullbrook.


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Curious Public’s Communications Insights on 2022

To borrow the author's phrase, "This year has been quite the decade." Curious Public's President and Narrative Lead, Lloyd Rang, gives us his Comms/Marketing Insights and upcoming trends on a year in review.


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Heart House Hospice Named Curious Public’s 2022 Uplift Recipient

Today Curious Public announced its partnership with Heart House Hospice through Uplift, the firm’s annual pro bono communications services program. Through the partnership, Curious Public will work with Heart House to help the organization execute its strategic communications plan across digital channels, improve its brand message and storytelling, and support a capital campaign for a new hospice facility. 


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Grading Adidas’ Statement on Kanye West

Somewhere in Adidas headquarters in Herzogenaurach, Germany, there are folks who look like they’ve just crawled out of a flaming dumpster after writing a corporate statement about the Kanye West/Adidas saga. This blog post is about the work they did.


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What Brands Can Do After an Image Meltdown: A Lesson Through Liz Truss

What do you try to communicate when your brand has just been reduced to a smoking crater? Executive Consultant, Leadership Strategy and Media Relations expert Jeff Keay weighs in on the hard lessons learned through Liz Truss.


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Uplifting the Uplifters: Scarborough Women’s Centre

In 2020, Lynda wrote on her Uplift application that the Scarborough Women’s Centre is “the little engine that could.” With modest resources, SWC was helping 3000 marginalized women become economically and emotionally independent for future success, free from violence, poverty, and isolation each year.

Last week, Lynda sat down with Curious Public’s Kristen Gross to talk about SWC, Uplift, and what’s changed for the organization since being part of the program.


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We Don’t Know, So Let’s Get Curious

Not knowing is a truth in life and business, but that’s where the fun and wisdom start. Curious Public writer Kristen Gross shares the unexpected teachings from life, love, death, and Socrates turning “not knowing” into a space for genuine curiosity and discovery.


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Curious Public Uplift 2022

We’re excited to announce our 4th annual Uplift program. If you are a non-profit or NGO in the Greater Toronto or Metro Vancouver area helping your community, we want to help you – at no cost!


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Announcing Curious Public

Following a rebranding exercise, Lloyd Rang Communications is now Curious Public!


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On Truthfulness

Honesty is expected from organizations, no different than with our own personal circles. To thrive, you have to embrace authenticity if for no other reason than a lack of authenticity will be called out and exposed.


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Lessons for Business … From the Theatre, of all Places

Memorising lines isn't the challenge, it's keeping spontaneity alive on the eigth iteration of the same show. Shannon Currie highlights, counter-intuitively, how your organization can actually foster creativity by following a set framework in the form of a narrative for your brand.


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Why the Three Most Frightening Words in English Are “Has Legal Reviewed?”

In another excerpt of etymology, LLoyd Rang weighs in on the balancing act with legal and communications professionals searching for that sweet spot between precision and creativity; legal jargon and poetry; Latin and English.


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Good Stories Make Us Feel We Belong

When a story makes you feel like you belong, it's a powerful thing. But it's not easy to do. Jordan Ray writes about a story that made him feel seen, and explains that to tell a powerful story, you've got to be curious first—curious enough to listen.


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Remembering James Bullbrook

Goodbye, James.


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Get Big Fast: The Communications Partnership Model

A lot of companies want to position themselves as “full service” agencies these days. But at best, they’re a Swiss-Army knife—a tiny pair of scissors when you need shears. As Lloyd Rang explains, that's why LRC has informal partnerships with companies who do PR, Graphic Design, Branding, and Videography. We bring them into our work because you don’t actually need to be good at everything—and if a client needs more than that, LRC finds the right partner to get the job done.


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What Six Blind Men and an Elephant Can Tell Us About Business

Lloyd Rang explains why an old story about six blind men and an elephant can teach us a lot about how companies understand themselves—and how LRC uses those lessons to help companies tell their stories.


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Two New VIP Training Experiences from CSC and LRC

One of the best parts of working in this business is crossing paths with people who share your values. That was certainly the case when we started talking with our partner, Corporate Speech Consultants (CSC) about building some shared training offerings. Together, we developed two unique VIP learning experiences. Registration for them both is now open for September.


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Tech Buzzwords Getting You Down? Blame the French.

Let’s face it — a lot of tech sector writing is weak and uninspired. As Lloyd Rang explains, the sector’s communications challenge began in the Middle Ages—a history lesson that can help tech startups make their stories punch through to the right people.


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Calling the Class of ’21: Enter our “Words that Get People Traveling” contest!

Graduation year is supposed to be a capstone year for students. But for the graduating class of 2021, they’ll probably watch their friends graduate from behind a screen without the kind of sendoff they deserve. Our team at LRC thinks that’s a bummer. So we decided to do something about it.


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Herb Fung Suits Up with LRC

LRC is thrilled to welcome Herb Fung to our team as Communications Advisor and Lead Writer.


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Awakening to a New Normal

As increasing vaccination rates signal the real possibility this pandemic could finally be over, Jeff Keay looks ahead at what we'll need to do to re-engage in the post-covid world.


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Corporate Speech Consultants Forms Preferred Partnership with Lloyd Rang Communications

Lloyd Rang Communications has entered a preferred partnership with Corporate Speech Consultants (CSC) — a group of academically trained executive coaches who can elevate your public speaking and prepare you to achieve your goals.


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When Telling is Showing

Writing about how movie dialogue can create the most memorable, impactful moments on-screen, James Bullbrook shares how memorable scripts don't just tell the audience what's going on—they bring us right into the moment and engage us by showing something new.


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The Best and Worst of a Truly Terrible Year

In our end of year blog, Lloyd Rang asked the LRC team for their best and worst moments of 2020. While it was a truly terrible year, there were some bright spots, from a communications standpoint, anyway. And there were also some moments where — even when you thought the year had reached rock-bottom — it managed to surprise us all by punching through the bedrock and going even lower.


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LRC Partners with Scarborough Women’s Centre

LRC and Scarborough Women’s Centre are pleased to announce their new partnership, which will begin January 2021.


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Kristen Gross Joins LRC Team

LRC is thrilled to welcome BC-based writer and communications professional Kristen Gross to our team as Director of Sales and Senior Associate Writer.


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Knock their socks off!

Jordan Ray shares tips on how you can make a good first impression by presenting yourself and your work in the best way possible


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Counsel Public Affairs Forms Preferred Partnership with Lloyd Rang Communications

One of Canada’s leading public affairs firms teams with upstart narrative agency


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From Speechwriter to Zoomwriter

A lot of my friends from politics still think of me as “the speechwriter.” It must be how William Shatner feels — no one talks to him about TJ Hooker, or Boston Legal or Rescue 911 or his albums or books — everyone thinks of him as Captain Kirk. It doesn’t matter what else he accomplishes in life, he’s always going to be the “to boldly go” guy. I feel for him. At the same time, it’s a darn good thing I’m not (just) a speechwriter right now. Because, frankly, there aren’t a lot of speeches being delivered to live, in-person audiences during COVID.


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The second wave is coming. Let’s remember the 6 lessons of the first wave

Today, it looks like the second wave of COVID has started again. Israel and the UK are locking down again. Ontario is reducing limits on private gatherings, and it’s looking like bars and indoor restaurants may be closed again. Line-ups at testing facilities are hours long, and hundreds of people are being turned away every day. Now is a good time to remember the six key lessons we learned in the first wave:


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LRC UPLIFT:
Doing Our Little Bit of Good to Uplift And Build Our Communities

So what is LRC Uplift, exactly? Well, every year, we provide our communications services free of charge for one year to a local charity or non-profit.


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The Power of the Pivot

Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez did something extraordinary last week. After she was verbally attacked by a Republican colleague, she used it to elevate her argument far beyond the personal circumstances of the incident.


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Communicating for the collective

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced all of us to ask a big question about how we communicate.  Specifically, who are we communicating to, and why are we communicating?


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What The West Wing Can Teach Us About Business

In politics, issues move fast. You can come back from lunch (that is, if you can get away from your desk) and find out a cabinet minister has resigned, there’s been a shooting and somehow the world has changed.


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Communicating Post-COVID

To close the circle, we’ve put our minds to how COVID might impact how we communicate in a world where it is no longer a pressing crisis, and even further down the road, where its impact is mitigated by proven treatments and, hopefully, an effective vaccine.


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Dear friends, some times too much communication is a bad thing

It's ok to feel scared. This is a scary situation, and carrying on with a 'stiff upper lip' serves no one. If you need to turtle under the covers for a day, go do that. Make sure you acknowledge your own mental health in all of this.


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Our Best Advice on Surviving (Thriving) when Working From Home

Unless your job requires you to physically touch someone (a doctor, a dentist, a competitive Ukrainian folk dancer) or manipulate or build something (a bricklayer, an aircraft landing-gear maker, a bobble-head-doll assembler) or you’re in precarious work like retail or the service sector,  you probably could have been working from home decades ago.


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LRC Partners With Urban Alliance on Race Relations

"Since 1975, the Urban Alliance for Race Relations has been devoted to working on educating and advocating for solutions to prejudice and intolerance. Today, in the context of growing racial tensions and anti-immigrant rhetoric around the world - including here in Canada, where police-reported hate crimes have recently doubled - the work that we do is more important than ever. But we know that an important part of successful advocacy is successful communication. ..."
- Neethan Shan, Executive Director, Urban Alliance for Race Relations (UARR)


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LRC Wins Platinum MARCOM Award

Industry recognition for the work we do is always a great honour - and this month we're SO PROUD to accept the highest award (Platinum!!!) for our recent project with the Region of Durham. The 2019 competition included more than 6000 entries from all over the world. Of those, the judges selected our team for recognition.

Here are some samples of our award-winning work!


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Here We Grow Again!

Bring us your passion and your talent – and when you’re done with LRC, you will have worked alongside our senior management team – on an amazing project with one of our newest clients. When your work is done, you’ll be able to point to an impressive case-study that will live online – and tell future employers about the role you played in a successful client campaign.


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8 Simple Rules to Help You Fundraise like a Boss

'Tis the season. With fiscal year-ends upon many of us and a federal election on the horizon - "advancement", fundraising and donor campaigns are in high gear. Which begs the question: with so many good and meaningful causes to donate valuable time and money to, what can advocacy groups, charities and other non-profit organizations do to rise above the digital clutter of people's daily lives in order to get them to DONATE?


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The KARMA Project

Calling all non-profits and NGO's doing meaningful work in Toronto and the GTA ? LRC’s Karma Project is about our team teaming up with you -- to help you connect with your audience. Pro-bono. Gratis. Free of charge.


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Can a Story Make a King? The Power of Narrative

What is more powerful than a compelling narrative? Arguably, nothing. It has the power to create queens and titans of industry, market leaders -- and world leaders.


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Why We Write

There are two kinds of communications professionals in the world: those who want to make the client sound like them, and those who want to make the client sound like the best version of themselves. In other words — communicators who want to control the client, and those who want to serve the client.


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What Your Audience Wants To Hear

PR professionals can work with their clients to find and tell their truth, but they still aren’t necessarily where they need to be. If you only connect with your audience intellectually, you aren’t being heard. That only happens when you connect with your audience emotionally. And then, you enter a kind of relationship with each other. The last presidential election proved that this relationship can withstand an extraordinary amount of stress.


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Welcome To The New LRC

We decided it was time to give Lloyd Rang Communications a refresh and we’re excited to share how far we’ve come over the past year!


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