by Kristina Kennedy “So you moved from Detroit to Boston to work for a car company.”    – My dad… calling me from Novi Michigan, 2006 “Hello,” I say, in the shaky voice of a 21-year-old making a cold call. “I read your article on DDOT and I… I … wanted to talk to...

by Lindsay Mahaney The phrase “supply chain” wasn’t in the common vernacular until the early days of the pandemic. Delayed shipments of PPE and the now-infamous obstruction of the Suez Canal were just two of the challenges that made supply chain disruptions a common talking point at dinner tables across the globe.    And...

by Rebecca Reese Cybersecurity Awareness Month can be a marketer’s best friend and thorn in their side all at once.  On one hand, it’s the one month a year when the spotlight shines on an industry most people aren’t experts in. It gives cybersecurity professionals a platform to encourage more responsible online behaviors, caution...

by Nycole Walsh Generative AI tools like ChatGPT have leveled the playing field when it comes to creating content. Brands of all shapes and sizes now have the ability to generate assets like blog posts, marketing materials, and eBooks faster than ever before – even without an in-house content team. It’s leading to an...

Social media is an integral part of conducting business in the digital age. Beyond broader corporate accounts, executives and employees are now expected to leverage social platforms to build their personal brands, too.    Everyone from potential buyers to job seekers uses social media to gather vital information about companies they’re interested in. Checking...

by Nycole Walsh This Valentine’s Day, Kickstand is celebrating the beating heart of the agency: our relationships.    The world of public relations (let’s be real, the world in general) has been through a few years of significant upheaval, and the landscape is still pretty much quicksand beneath our feet – marked by massive layoffs...

Calling 2023 a “tough year” would be an understatement. Companies across every industry had to hunker down and push through, resulting in budget cuts, layoffs, and disgruntled employees.    To get a pulse check on how business leaders fared in 2023 and how they’re planning to take 2024 in stride, Kickstand surveyed over 600...

By Nora Panahi We live the vast majority of our lives online these days. The way we work, communicate with each other, shop, and so on takes place on any number of digital channels – which means the importance of data privacy isn’t an unfamiliar concept to us. Nobody wants their private information falling...

By Nycole Walsh As 2023 draws to a close, our team here at Kickstand is taking inventory of a pretty tumultuous twelve months. Anyone working in tech PR or marketing can tell you that this has been the year of “doing more with less,” and for us, one of the things this meant was...

This month, Kickstand is celebrating our tenth anniversary! From our humble beginnings at a kitchen table to supporting some of the world’s most innovative brands, Kickstand has always set ourselves apart from the rest. Our commitment to unparalleled proactivity, supporting working parents, and empathetic leadership has been at the core of what we do...

By Nora Panahi Celebrating Pride in 2023 has been a fraught, bittersweet experience for the queer community.   In recent memory, Pride has manifested itself through flashy parades and festivals and a proliferation of rainbow-colored logos from various brands. Many of us who attend Pride celebrations as members of the queer community and/or allies...

By Molly George When I sit down with prospects, the biggest pain point I hear day in and day out about past experiences with PR agency partners is a lack of proactivity. Agencies tend to come in hot and operate with a high sense of urgency to impress new clients right out of the...

By Kristina Kennedy At Kickstand, we are consistently acknowledged for the robust benefits package we offer our working parents. But we are also consistently asked “why” we offer benefits unique to this group. Before we share the somewhat long answer to this question, here’s the short version: Because we should offer these benefits. Because...

By Anna Craven and Nora Panahi Whenever Anna and I attend an in-person Kickstand event, we find a way to sneak the fact that we went to high school together into conversation. We’ve known each other for at least a decade at this point, and (I hope) I speak for both of us when...

By Tiffani Lee With Q1 wrapping up (if you can believe it), Kickstand has hit the ground running in 2023. Between client announcements, in-person conferences and too many media hits to count, a group of Kickstanders has been meeting monthly to read and discuss SPARK: How to Lead Yourself and Others to Greater Success....

By James Paasche “With great power comes great responsibility” might be a cheesy, popular superhero slogan masquerading as a general philosophy about the ethics of power, but cliches gain their status because there is a kernel of truth in them. And with the recent rise of generative AI tools, like ChatGPT and DALL-E, the...

By Nora Panahi The turbulent economy that came to define 2022 shows no signs of smoothing out in 2023. Tightened budgets, more conservative growth plans, and operationalizing efficient practices were common threads in the majority of media conversations – regardless of industry or business size.  Our clients came to the table with expert advice...

By Hannah Eure The crowded showroom floors and speaker sessions at CES seem to have rebounded to their pre-pandemic highs. But if you look a bit closer, you’ll notice the show has changed quite a bit over the past few years. Along with the show’s evolution, making the most of your marketing buck may...

By Nora Panahi As we celebrate the new year and bid adieu to 2022, the world is Kickstanders’ oyster!    To ring in 2023, we asked Kickstand employees about their goals for the next twelve months, and we found there’s no shortage of professional and personal ambitions among our team. Here are just some...

By Ally Rung From Dogecoin to the collapse of FTX to the vision of a cashless society, the world of cryptocurrency can seem overwhelming and difficult to navigate, especially from a PR perspective. Macro conversations about the future of finance abound, so there’s no shortage of opportunities to feature client expertise and commentary on...

By James Paasche and Tiffani Lee Remote work is no longer a novelty. Between 2019-2021, the number of US employees working from home tripled, up to almost 18% of the country’s population. And those numbers continue to grow, particularly in sectors like tech, where the digital office has replaced or emerged as a hybrid...

By Anna Craven At our Quarterly Business Review in May 2022, Kickstand’s Distributed Committee made a momentous announcement to the rest of the agency: every Kickstander, for the rest of the summer, was going to have every other Friday off.    Having monitored the four day work week’s growing popularity for some time, including...

By Nora Panahi This spooky season at Kickstand, we’ve decided to face our fears. We asked everyone at the agency to share what scared them the most when they first started their PR careers, and any advice they’d give themselves if they could go back in time to quell those anxieties.  Whether you’re at...

By Nora Panahi We’re seeing more and more businesses consider cutting parental benefits to offset the cost of inflation, and we are, to say the least, disappointed. Even when times are tough, supporting the needs of your team should be kept a priority. In fact, it’s in tougher times that teams often need the...

This month, Kickstand is celebrating our nine year anniversary!  What began as a two-woman operation at a kitchen table in Texas is now a rapidly growing global team, with programs spanning North America, the UK, EMEA, and APAC. A recent honoree of the Inc. 5000 (and a proud one at that!), we can attribute...

By Rebecca Reese I’ll leave it to Johnny Cash to say what we all know, “Well, bad news travels like wildfire.”  The 2020s have been defined by headlines that are unsettling at best… but I don’t need to tell anyone that. As public relations professionals, we have to strike a balance between breaking through...

By Nora Panahi Last week, I had the privilege of attending the virtual Pride Summit 2022: Lesbians Who Tech and Allies. This conference was a place for people of marginalized identities (queer folks, people of color, folks whose gender identities exist outside the binary, etc.) who are underrepresented in the tech industry to share...

By Becca Reap and Nora Panahi Today, June 1, marks the first day of Pride Month 2022. Traditionally, Pride Month is a time to celebrate LGBTQ+ communities and highlight the ongoing pursuit of equal justice and opportunity. We’ll also be observing Juneteenth this month to honor the emancipation of enslaved people in the United...

By James Paasche “It is not a lunch break or a quick walk to get coffee. It is a full hour for YOU and that is forever needed in the crazy world of media and PR.” “Mental health hours give us the opportunity to remove a worry/task off our mental shelf.” In honor of...

By Nora Panahi May is Mental Health Awareness Month, but supporting employees’ mental wellness is an effort Kickstand takes seriously year-round. Whether folks are dealing with the emotional fallout of the global pandemic, struggling with depression, or just simply need time to rest and recharge, Kickstand has a number of initiatives and benefits geared...

By Amanda Montgomery On this Earth Day and beyond, sustainability should be an essential consideration for businesses as awareness and concern rises across all types of Earth-dwellers. And whether the intention is to better serve their customers or just pursue a personal passion, more and more companies are adopting sustainable practices and business tactics....

By Rebecca Reese and Rebecca Reap The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted the world in more ways than we can count, including forever changing not only the way we work, but where we work. That’s not expected to change any time soon either, as surveys find more than 90% of remote employees want to stay...

After watching stress levels begin to come down week-over-week, the optimism may have been short-lived, as this week, we saw them ramp back up by 4%. While not a huge gain, we still wanted to better understand the causes of this uptick. Within the pulse study, we’ve continuously tracked three items...

We’ve made it through another week of lockdown. How are you feeling? If maybe just a tad bit better than last week, then you’re in line with the national sentiment, which reported an average 5% decline in stress levels. In the second week of our COVID-19 stress study, we spoke...