Affective Intelligence applies anywhere a message lands in a human nervous system. Below are the nine industries where Elizabeth has built her practice — and where the framework's specific implications matter most.
The home turf — and the field she's now reshaping for the Intelligence Era.
Public relations is the field Elizabeth has spent twenty-five years inside, advancing, and increasingly leading. She is the originator of PR 3.0 — the paradigm naming the shift from press release-driven publicity (PR 1.0) and platform-mediated reputation (PR 2.0) to the AI-mediated trust economy of the Intelligence Era. As PRSA's Lead AI Speaker, she is the national voice teaching public relations professionals what the profession actually requires now.
For agency leaders, in-house communication directors, and senior practitioners, Elizabeth offers what the field has been missing: a science-based account of why messages succeed or fail, and a forward-looking operational model for AI-mediated audiences. This is the field she is reshaping in real time — through the PRSA AI curriculum, the PR Consultants Group presidency, and the keynote stages of every major PR event in 2026.
Where the messages most need to land — because public trust is what they build or break.
Government and public information work happens under conditions most communicators never face — political scrutiny, media adversarial pressure, complex stakeholder dynamics, regulatory constraint, crisis after crisis, and the obligation to communicate truthfully with citizens whose trust in institutions is already strained. The cost of getting it wrong is measured in lives, votes, and the long arc of public confidence in democracy itself.
Affective Intelligence is uniquely suited to this work. Elizabeth's clients in this space include Operation Lifesaver — the national NGO leading rail-safety education and public-awareness work — and her keynote and training engagements span CAPIO, NSPRA, and the state and federal agency comms teams that shape public communication at every level of government. The framework explains why traditional government messaging often fails to land — the affective conditions of the citizenry have already been set by other signals — and provides a practice for communication that rebuilds capacity rather than further depleting it.
Where every message lands in a body — and most communicators forget that.
Healthcare communication has the most literal version of the Affective Intelligence claim — every message a hospital, payer, university health-science program, or specialty practice sends is landing in the nervous system of a patient, a family member, a clinician, a regulator, or a policy decision-maker whose physiology is already under load. The wrong message in healthcare doesn't just underperform. It compresses the very capacity it was meant to serve.
Elizabeth has worked across the healthcare and health-science landscape for over two decades — from Shriners Hospitals for Children and major hospital systems to Delta Dental of New Hampshire, Arizona State University, and health-science communication teams at Novartis and adjacent organizations. The work covers patient communication, public health messaging, provider education, executive positioning, and the increasingly complex AI-and-trust questions facing every healthcare and health-science organization in 2026.
Where institutional trust is being rebuilt — or eroded — one message at a time.
Higher education and K-12 institutions are operating in the most challenging communication environment in their history. Public confidence in education has been declining for two decades. Enrollment is contested. AI is reshaping what counts as student work, faculty expertise, and institutional value. Parents, donors, alumni, regulators, and prospective students are all forming beliefs about institutions through AI-mediated environments before any human contact takes place.
Elizabeth has worked with education clients ranging from Arizona State University and major higher-education marketing teams to the Idaho STEM Action Center — where her behavioral communication framework earned multiple national awards including 2024 Hermes Platinum and Gold MarComm — and across K-12 district PIO networks through NSPRA. The work is about rebuilding trust at scale: parent and family communication, board and donor relationships, enrollment and admissions narratives, and the AI-era visibility that determines whether your institution shows up at all in the conversations parents and students are having with AI.
Where every communication is a trust transaction — long before it is a product transaction.
Insurance and financial services exist at the most consequential intersection of trust, complexity, and human anxiety in the modern economy. The product is invisible. The promise is contingent. The customer is making decisions about events they hope never happen — death, illness, market collapse — under the cognitive load of fear and the affective weight of family responsibility. This is one of the hardest communication environments in business.
Elizabeth has worked with Allstate Insurance, Transamerica, Delta Dental of New Hampshire, and across the insurance and financial-services communication landscape — including substantial B2B work for the software and technology companies serving the insurance and financial-services sectors. The framework's specific value here is that it explains why most financial communication backfires — it triggers the very instincts it was hoping to soothe — and provides a practice for messaging that calibrates rather than compresses. The work spans executive communication, customer-facing messaging, agent and broker enablement, regulatory and compliance positioning, and crisis response under market and reputational pressure.
A specialty built across twenty-five years of B2B technology, enterprise tech, telecommunications, and the emerging-tech companies redefining how the world works.
Technology has been a defining throughline of Elizabeth's twenty-five-year career. The work spans B2B technology and professional-services firms, enterprise technology and telecommunications giants, and the early-stage and growth-stage tech startups whose products are now the operating system of modern life. From major brands like Sony, Charter, and BMW to the technology infrastructure that quietly powers entire industries, this is the sector where the framework's specific implications matter most for the moment we are in.
For technology companies — from frontier AI labs to enterprise SaaS, telecommunications operators, B2B technology providers, and consumer tech brands — the framework's value is unique. AI has now installed an intelligence layer between every technology company and every audience it serves, and the trust dynamics that determine market acceptance, regulatory posture, and consumer adoption are governed by exactly the affective mechanisms her work has been mapping. Elizabeth advises technology and AI companies on internal and external communication, AI ethics positioning, executive narrative, and the trust architecture that determines whether the next generation of products is welcomed or rejected.
Where every dollar raised, every advocate engaged, every mission advanced runs on trust.
Nonprofits operate in the most trust-dependent environment in any sector. Donors give because they trust the mission. Advocates engage because they trust the cause. Beneficiaries participate because they trust the organization. And nonprofits typically have the smallest communication budgets and the least dedicated PR staff to manage that trust at scale.
Elizabeth has worked across the mission-driven sector for over two decades — from Shriners Hospitals for Children and Operation Lifesaver (the national NGO leading rail-safety education) to the Evans Scholars Foundation through her work with BMW, the Idaho STEM Action Center (where the behavioral communication framework she developed earned multiple 2024 national awards including Hermes Platinum and Gold MarComm), and a long list of advocacy organizations and foundations she advises. She has been a multi-year speaker at the PRSA Nonprofit & Association Conference, where she teaches affect architecture to the communication leaders shaping the mission-driven sector. The work covers donor communication, advocacy messaging, program-impact storytelling, AI-era visibility for cause organizations, and the kind of long-arc trust strategy that makes the difference between an organization that survives the decade and one that thrives in it.
For C-suites navigating the most consequential leadership transition in fifty years.
For corporate executives, boards, and enterprise leadership teams, Affective Intelligence is the operating model the moment requires. Every Fortune 500 organization is now navigating AI transformation, an erosion of public trust in institutions, generational shifts in workforce expectations, and a pace of change that traditional leadership communication frameworks were never designed to handle. The leaders who are succeeding are the ones who understand that the rules have changed at a deeper layer than strategy.
Elizabeth has guided communication and leadership work at Sony, BMW, Charter, Novartis, Transamerica, and across the Fortune 500. Her client list reads like a list of the organizations shaping modern life — and the engagements span executive narrative, board and stakeholder communication, employee communication during transformation, AI strategy at the leadership level, and the crisis-and-reputation work that protects what an organization has spent decades building. She also serves on boards and in fractional leadership capacities for organizations integrating Affective Intelligence at the top of the house.
She is one. She leads them. She knows what associations actually wrestle with.
Elizabeth is uniquely positioned in the association space. She is the President of the PR Consultants Group — a national consortium of fifty-plus independent agency owners — which gives her direct, ongoing experience of association leadership rather than view-from-outside speculation about it. She is the Lead AI Speaker for the largest PR association in the country. She keynotes the major communication-association stages annually. And she has provided strategic counsel to associations and member organizations across multiple verticals.
For association directors, executive teams, and member-engagement leaders, the work covers the specific dynamics of member organizations — recruitment and retention, advocacy cycles, event promotion, AI-era visibility for member-driven content, and the long-arc trust strategy that determines whether an association remains essential or becomes optional in its members' lives.
Affective Intelligence applies anywhere a message lands in a human nervous system. If your industry isn't listed above, it's not because the framework doesn't fit. It's because it hasn't been customized for you yet — and that's a conversation worth having.