KAP Consulting Blog
Musings on messages that mobilize.
Keeping a multi-partner magazine on voice and on standard
One of the services I offer through KAP Consulting is editorial management. Here's what that looked like on a recent project. Last winter I was managing editor of Asilomar Magazine, a 113-page hybrid literary magazine and visitors' guide for Asilomar State Beach and...
Building a style guide for a food justice nonprofit
In second grade, I finished a spelling test early and started reading the dictionary. My teacher accused me of cheating. I told her I wasn't checking my answers — I literally just wanted more words. Four decades later, I still read style manuals for fun. So one of my...
The campaign message that found its way back to my kid
During his first week as a Monterey Bay Aquarium Teen Conservation Leader, my teenage son texted me a photo. It was an exhibit panel about plastic pollution, and I was on it, holding a selfie frame with jazz pianist Gerald Clayton and then-Monterey Jazz Festival...
How student groceries helped me explain a climate law
Good food shouldn't be thrown away. Every mom and grandma I've met would agree. Yet we live in a society that generates unfathomable food waste. The USDA estimates 30-40% of the U.S. food supply goes uneaten; most of that waste happens in stores and homes. The food...
What Arum palaestina taught me about ancestral memory
My 12-year-old son and I were hiking with some friends at Big Sur Land Trust's Marks Ranch when TJ fell back from our group. I found him squatting next to a cluster of what looked like lily leaves – broad, veiny sheaths opened flat to the sun. Among them was a...
The presidential ivy with a marketing lesson
In my living room, by the kids’ instruments and the dog’s favorite chill spot, lives a Swedish ivy with a presidential lineage. This trailing plant — with shiny green leaves and ambitious stems that cascade over the pot's edges — began as a cutting from my mother's...
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