About

Whether you work in business, a nonprofit, or any other profession, communication has become one of the most important subjects for all of us to understand and apply at a far more advanced level. From skillful speaking to effective negotiation, every individual and organization now has a stake in bettering their communication practices to impact clients, build partnerships, create dynamic and positive work cultures, and more.

Communication Upward was founded by Dr. Don Waisanen to bring together the very best evidence-based and results-focused work in communication with practical applications that can be immediately embedded in and scaled across organizations. Based in New York, through workshops and consulting Communication Upward is building a movement to improve the communication skills of professionals at all  levels and–as communication experts like W. Barnett Pearce have long called for–evolve human beings’ communication habits in an “upward” direction across societies in the process. Four key values distinguish our training and development work:

• Cutting-edge: All of our trainings are up-to-date with current developments in the communication field and related disciplines. Since new scientific advances are made every day by communication researchers and practitioners, all our work is grounded in both a deep and broad knowledge-base about communication, while also focusing on “the news” in each area.
• Evidence-based: From having difficult conversations to organizing meetings, far too many of us approach our communication through a limited range of ideas/methods grounded in intuition (what I think will work), tradition (what the people or groups I’m usually with would do), or experience (I’ve always done it this way). Contrary to these approaches, we provide our clients with credible evidence-based practices that remain sensitive to contexts while improving communication choices.
• Fun: From psychology to economics, an emerging consensus of scholars and practitioners have shown that positive and enjoyable learning experiences provide superior outcomes to other methods/models. As such, we inject “serious play, humor, and fun” into all our trainings. Boring, they ain’t.
• Civic-focused: It doesn’t matter if we’re working with for or nonprofit clients, all of our work focuses on developing organizations and individuals who can exercise resilient leadership, collaborate well across silos, and contribute meaningfully to the greater civic and societal good. The world needs it.

To address this mission and these values, Communication Upward offers communication workshops and intensives covering skills that that can be immediately implemented by professionals of all kinds, such as healthcare administrators, educators, lawyers,  scientists, and more. We also offer facilitation for retreats, meetings, and other events using the most appropriate, evidence-based facilitation tools to produce the decisions and outcomes your group most needs. Recognizing how quickly communication skills can be improved in preparation for a speech, our one-on-one speech coaching and writing services have a proven record of helping people rise to their next level through individually tailored strategies and feedback. Communication Upward further provides comprehensive strategic communication consulting for all kinds of organizations, moving their messaging, connections with media, and ability to reach new audiences more firmly into the 21st century.

For “Competency, Accountability, and Transparency,” Communication Upward abides by the National Communication Association’s Best Practices for Communication Training and Consulting