Connecting With Your Community Through a New Brand

What You’ll Learn

Launching or refreshing a brand? Get storytelling tips and tactics from Elizabeth Kuhns, who partnered with Pioneer to create the Ignite Broadband brand.

Guest Speaker

Elizabeth Kuhns

Show Notes

Transcripts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

Intro: A production of Pioneer Utility Resources. StoryConnect, helping communicators discover ideas to shape their stories and connect with their customers.

Megan McKoy-Noe: How could you connect with your community through a new brand? That’s what we’ll be talking about on this episode of The StoryConnect Podcast. Hi, I’m your host, Megan McKoy-Noe, one of the storytellers at Pioneer Utility Resources, and I am joined by the amazing Elizabeth Kuhns, business development manager at Ignite Broadband, a division of Dickson Electric System in Tennessee. And we are recording live at the Calix ConneXions Conference in Las Vegas with 2,000 other broadband storytellers, almost 3,000, I think. It’s a lot. So any noise that you hear in the background, we’re going to call it ambiance, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Kuhns: That’s right. It’s setting the tone.

Megan McKoy-Noe: It is setting the tone.

Elizabeth Kuhns: A connection.

Megan McKoy-Noe: The magic of connections.

Elizabeth Kuhns: The magic of connections.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Which is why we are here today. Elizabeth, thank you so much for being with me.

Elizabeth Kuhns: Thank you, Megan, for having me. And I want to say this has been a dream come true because I’m a big fan of the podcast, and I have known Andy Johns now for a long time. And so I’ve listened for a long time, and I have given him a hard time because I didn’t know you. And now I have worn you down long enough that I have finally been asked to be a guest. So it’s an honor.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Elizabeth. If you do want Andy to come over and interview you, he’s standing right over there too, so we can make that happen for you.

Elizabeth Kuhns: It wasn’t about who I would be on, okay?

Megan McKoy-Noe: It was just getting here. Well, I think you all have an amazing story to tell at Dickson Electric. But then, I mean, the things that you all have done with Ignite Broadband are exciting.

Elizabeth Kuhns: Yes. It’s so exciting. This industry, this journey, has been something that has been a brand new feat for Dickson Electric, for myself. Just a little of my background. I have been with Dickson Electric System, which is a municipal electric system in Middle Tennessee. We serve parts of five counties. We’re just west of Nashville, just a stone’s throw away. And it’s a growing community. We serve parts of Dickson, Hickman, Houston, Montgomery, and Cheatham counties. And so when you look at us, we actually look, our footprint, looks much more like a cooperative.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Public power rocks. We are firm believers of that on the pod.

Elizabeth Kuhns: Absolutely, the many benefits of being community-owned and community-operated. And so that model was very important to us, very important to our brand with Dickson Electric System. And in my previous role, prior to coming to the Ignite Broadband division within Dickson Electric, I really managed that brand. And we went all in, jumped, you know, jumped into the deep end of community. And so it was a wonderful fit when our board of directors decided that we would finally be branching out and offering broadband services to Dickson Electric customers. So it’s been very exciting.

Megan McKoy-Noe: So you mentioned the analogy of swimming in the community, like fully immersing yourself, which I really like. I don’t think we talk about making a splash in our community enough. But you did that for ten years through a very established brand in your community.

Elizabeth Kuhns: Yes.

Megan McKoy-Noe: And you wanted to be, like to connect with your community.

Elizabeth Kuhns: Yeah.

Megan McKoy-Noe: And then you created a whole new brand.

Elizabeth Kuhns: Yes.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Started from scratch.

Elizabeth Kuhns: Yeah.

Megan McKoy-Noe: So which is always such fun. The opportunities that are there.

Elizabeth Kuhns: The opportunity. I love it when people put a fun spin on things and look at it, look at things as an opportunity. And certainly this was an opportunity.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Well, and I wanted to ask you before you began this brand process, you had words that you wanted people to associate with this new brand. So talk to us a little bit about what your dream was for this brand.

Elizabeth Kuhns: When we were starting to talk about what Dickson Electric’s broadband division name would be, we talked about the obvious: DES Broadband or DES Fiber. And we also talked about creating a brand new brand, one that would stand alone. We looked at places like Cullman Electric. They had Sprout.

Megan McKoy-Noe: We love them.

Elizabeth Kuhns: I could go on and on with different utilities that we looked at and that I bookmarked on my laptop. But I actually decided that I was going to do what I love to do, and that is survey our employees and ask our own people, our own brand advocates for Dickson Electric System, who have heard me for ten years, at that time, cheering. I was like a little cheerleader about public power, and not-for-profit and community, community, community. And so, but I wanted to know what they thought, what words, what terms and adjectives. And so we did that. We sought their input from at the beginning, and then working with Pioneer. And then once we got the top three of our favorite options, we allowed – I put it in a Google form, and I reached back out to our employees and got their feedback.

Megan McKoy-Noe: I love that because so often these decisions get made, and especially with adding broadband to an already busy workload – not just for you, but for all the employees. Getting the staff buy-in, finding out, it’s so critical. And I’ve got to be honest, I haven’t heard of a team. I’ve heard folks surveying their membership about things, but not the staff.

Elizabeth Kuhns: Yeah, and I really did. We did discuss going, like putting it in the newspaper and really putting it on social media and getting 100% of the community. Because here’s the thing, and anybody who’s been through this process of creating a broadband division or a business, especially if you’re an established utility, an electric provider, all eyes are on you. Your quasi government people expect things, and they don’t understand the process. And the ins and outs of from the financing side of things to the logistical side of things to selecting these industry partners that are going to help actually pull this, you know, pull this feat off. And so, but you announce it, and then there’s like nothing to provide. So I thought, you know, being able to give them something, and let them know that we’re working on this. But ultimately just getting that buy-in from, internal buy-in, from our employees. And they know us best. They know our customer best. And you’re right, that anybody who has studied organizational change can tell you a thing or two about when you’re creating an entirely new division.

Elizabeth Kuhns: And there’s going to be a lot of the rumors that get started from the fear of what is this going to mean for me? What is this going to mean for my job? I’m going to have more work. Are you kidding me? I’m already spread too thin. And then two, you know the myths, the lapses in communication. No matter how hard you try,

Megan McKoy-Noe: They’re going to happen.

Elizabeth Kuhns: They will happen. And so being able to get them to even care. And it wasn’t just like our CSRs or our customer facing departments, it was from the top to bottom. I remember printing out the survey that I had created. Once we got down to the top three and walking it down to visit with my linemen who I love so much, and I had printed them out in color so they could see them, so that they can give me their feedback in-person. Because they’re not going to –.

Megan McKoy-Noe: I love that.

Elizabeth Kuhns: They might have email, but most of them will tell you, they don’t know where it is. They don’t like have it on their phones.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Well, no, no, of course not. But taking it to them, letting them see, “Hey, before we even name this new brand and start creating this and talking to anyone else, we want to know what you think about it.” It gives them a sense of ownership of the brand before it’s begun.

Elizabeth Kuhns: Yes.

Megan McKoy-Noe: That’s brilliant, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Kuhns: Thank you.

Megan McKoy-Noe: I love this idea. So what else did you do to get the staff buy-in? Because we’re talking about connecting your a new brand with a community. And we often think about the community as being, you know, the folks we serve. But honestly your employees, that’s the first community that you need to connect with. So when you launched the brand, how did you build excitement internally for the brand?

Elizabeth Kuhns: So ended up I mean, spoiler alert, fast forward a few months, and we had been given such amazing options from Pioneer. We had been, and you talk about seeking feedback, once we had those top three, we really, but I knew, it was kind of unanimous with those of the inner circle of people who were working with Pioneer. And again, they leaned heavily on me. And I’m such an open book, as you already know. And so my excitement and enthusiasm when, they gave me the brand Ignite Broadband, and it was not on my list, on my notes app that probably had 200 adjectives and terms. I was so proud and excited and impressed and baffled, kind of. And then I know that DES Fiber was the other option that was the leader. And what’s interesting, and this is something for anybody who’s listening, who’s in the business. Just talking to people, because what I knew is, people don’t know what fiber is. People think fiber is the stuff that’s in cereal. Or, you know, like. And I talked to our controller, Melinda Muraoka. I saw her one day in the break room, and it was her and our cashier supervisor. And I was having a conversation with them as we were, you know, balancing all these options, these two leading options. And Melinda, who’s our controller, she’s on the management team. She’s at the top, you know, and she was like, “DES Fiber sounds like something you need to talk to your doctor about,” or something like that. And I was like, if she doesn’t know, and she’s got a seat at the table for the most – then our community, our customers, are certainly not going to know. There will be some of them. You know, the 20% of people who care enough to know what fiber optic is. But other than that, it does not tell them. It doesn’t say internet. Even broadband doesn’t necessarily say internet.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Well, and it doesn’t tell the story because it’s not about – and this is just me. You know, we talk so often about what we do and how we do it, but we don’t talk about why we do it. And to me, Ignite Broadband is about potential.

Elizabeth Kuhns: Yes.

Megan McKoy-Noe: It’s about growth.

Elizabeth Kuhns: Right. And I mean immediately, and I don’t know, hopefully when you post this podcast, you can have a link to something so that people can see the actual logo that Pioneer also helped create. Because there are sparks. I mean, it’s got the sparks for a flame, and then you think – even the emoji, the sparks emoji, and I use it all the time. I use it on our social media. Thinking about the kind of terminology that you can use surrounding a launch that you’re igniting. And then the video, the launch video that we actually partnered with our friends at Pioneer to create. It was such a – there was so much potential. You said it, like it really does. Whether, you know, on the electric side, I used to use a lot of electricity puns, because it’s fun, you know. And light and power, powerful. All of that is important and still relevant on this side. And so to come up with a brand that kind of marries the two. Of course, on electricity, flames are bad.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Yeah. I was going to say we should say it’s, it’s more like –

Elizabeth Kuhns: Igniting a movement. Igniting –.

Megan McKoy-Noe: It’s energy. It’s excitement. It’s connections coming on all sides. It’s the potential.

Elizabeth Kuhns: Yeah. And we could do, honestly, a whole other podcast. I wish, if I had been more prepared, I could have printed the script that we did for our launch video, because it incorporated so many of those terms that we’re kind of dancing around right now about igniting a movement in our community. And we tied it back to 1905 with when we had a steam engine generator that provided electric power to our customers for the first time ever, it was ignited what would become a really growing area. And so we believe in this service, and we believe in this business. And we are so proud to be able to do it and to do it for our communities and for the right reasons. And what we keep telling, because it is a growing area. I keep communicating to those, like if I speak to the chamber or a rotary event, I am telling people that it is going to empower growth. But what we want is to remove the barriers that are in place at this point, from there being a lack of access. And then empowering our communities to grow and to grow strategically and carefully and thoughtfully. And that’s up to the governing bodies and the elected officials and leaders to manage what that looks like moving forward.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Yeah, I love that. Do you have any closing thoughts for folks thinking about a brand and how to really make sure that brand can connect with your community?

Elizabeth Kuhns: Well, I think that you need to kind of not be afraid to seek the feedback on the front end, in the middle, and then at the end. And you asked me a question that I never answered. So I’m going to go back to that in my final, in my closing thoughts. Because you said, you know, once it was time to launch, what did we do to maintain that buy-in? What we did is we planned a launch event. It was right after the windstorm. I’m telling you, we could have podcast episode after podcast episode.

Megan McKoy-Noe: I see your plan. We’re going to have a mini series here.

Elizabeth Kuhns: But like the windstorm that hit in March. It was March 3rd of 2023. That following week was our launch week, and I, in my previous role, when we had an outage, it would be – I like went into overdrive. And so it was an insane week leading up to that. But what we had been very passionate about was, we wanted t-shirts, we wanted swag. So t-shirts don’t mean anything to linemen. They want the hat. And we got the hats. We got the good Richardson 112s, you know. And then we had food. And we had even some door prizes that are a little nicer. And just like 2 or 3. We had all employee meetings. We did an internal launch on Thursday and an external launch to follow that Friday. And so that way your employees are hearing everything and knowing everything first before then the community learns it. And we had posts. I remember my my team and I, and so, we have Ronnie Sager, and then we also have George Benjamin, our operations manager. He’s phenomenal. He was a CDE Lightband before. He has all of the experience. And we have Zach Culpepper. He was at Cumberland Connect again, the amazing Cumberland Connect team. We are lucky enough to have him as our network engineer. They all have experience in this, and Ronnie and George and Zach and myself, we prepared ourselves for a long two days that Thursday and Friday for those launches. And then we even had planned out all of the signage. We had our our kind of pop-up banners ready to put in our lobby. We had a kiosk ready to throw out there. We had decals to put at every window. QR codes everywhere, so people could join our list.

Megan McKoy-Noe: You had van raps, right?

Elizabeth Kuhns: Yeah. Yeah. Well, we had a, the launch video showed a van rap, I think is what you’re thinking of. We didn’t have it fully like, that would have been cool. But I wish we did know. But we had everything ready, and that just again, including everyone, giving them a t-shirt that they can wear, that we talked to Daryl about getting everybody a jean day. And listen, if you have people who work in the office, and they don’t get to wear jeans every day, that is, it’s the little things.

Megan McKoy-Noe: It’s huge.

Megan McKoy-Noe: And so thankfully, Daryl Gillespie understands the importance of the little things and worked with us to be able to give everybody a free jean day. We had donuts, you know. We just did it right. We had a party, a celebration, and we didn’t act like it wasn’t going to mean a lot of work, or it wasn’t going to, you know, we weren’t going to face challenges, but we did our best to blanket it in enthusiasm and really, you know, ignite the excitement in them so that then. Because up to that point, a lot of the narrative was, “:I don’t know. I don’t know.” Like, there wasn’t a lot. And so that was the beginning of the end of that. You will know things. We’re in that build out process. We are starting to be able to get this to the customers. So from this point, looking forward from this point, we won’t ever have to tell the customer, I don’t know. Or they’re not telling me anything. It’s going to be – it’s happening. And here’s what we know right now.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Right. I don’t know if you do this. So forgive me for talking out of turn, but hearing about the jeans, it makes me wonder if you all have fiber fun days. Oh, right.

Elizabeth Kuhns: Not yet.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Because if they wear their fiber, their Ignite Broadband shirts, and they can wear jeans on Fridays, and maybe you send out fun updates that day to let them know what’s going on. Because engaging them and building, you know, we talk again about community trust and respect and telling your story to external audiences. But I think that internal community building that trust with them straight out of the gate, and then maintaining it over time –

Elizabeth Kuhns: Absolutely.

Megan McKoy-Noe: It’s so important to your brand.

Elizabeth Kuhns: Yeah. You don’t want to kind of preach to a tired people. One thing and make empty promises, and then fail them. And I was very passionate about that. After our launch, I was like, okay, you guys, we’ve now made these promises. We are on record. Now, it’s time for us to like, follow through. And so whether it’s meeting our dates if we’ve set dates or not meeting those dates because of whatever has happened, and then communicating that out ahead of time. Instead of it just going on as though nothing had happened. So just that accountability factor and engagement. You’re right. We’re at this Calix event, and I saw that the Calix, the amazing people at Calix, are changing. I think it was the Experience IQ is now going to be Engagement. No Marketing Cloud is becoming Engagement Cloud. That’s what it was. And I just love that term engagement. It definitely was one of the terms on my notes app. And it’s certainly something that is important, not just externally with our customers and our communities, but it starts internally.

Megan McKoy-Noe: It always, always starts internally. And I love hearing about the words that you used as a foundation for your brand, developing the brand, getting your internal community engaged and connected to the idea and enthusiastic about it. And I mean, I’m just going to tell you now, I will invite you back on the podcast later on so that we can follow up on the story.

Elizabeth Kuhns: Yeah, well, there’s more to tell. Yes, absolutely. We are just within the next month or two, we’re going to be connecting our first customers. We are at the brink of, we’re about to ignite quite a movement. So you’ll have to have us back so that we can share an update, and hopefully be able to share lessons learned and victories.

Megan McKoy-Noe: There you go. I like it. It’s all a victory when we’re sharing ideas. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story with utility pioneers. She is Elizabeth Kuhns, business development manager at Ignite Broadband. And I’m your host, Megan McKoy-Noe at Pioneer Utility Resources. Until we talk again, keep telling your story.

Outro: StoryConnect is produced by Pioneer Utility Resources, a communications cooperative that is built to share your story. StoryConnect is engineered by Lucas Smith of Lucky Sound Studio.