Internal Communications Strategist & Advisor

Trust erodes at every handoff in the message chain. I build the infrastructure that stops it.

Fifteen years building communications infrastructure at Fortune 500 companies through mergers, reorganizations, workforce reductions, and sustained transformation. For internal communications leaders who need the last mile to hold, and for CHROs and People leaders who need to know what their organization's data is actually telling them.

15+
Years in enterprise comms
50
eNPS points recovered post-RIF
8k
Employees integrated, M&A
Heather Vaughn
"Most organizations communicate. Very few build the infrastructure to make it land."
Experience at
Viasat T-Mobile Microsoft MultiCare
Who This Is For

Two roles, one breakdown, two different jobs to do about it.

The Cascade Suite
For internal communications leaders

You own the message chain from leadership to the front line, and you carry the load of every handoff in between: managers who need preparation, a queue you cannot defend without a framework, and no way to show whether any of it moved trust.

Heads of IC · Directors of IC · Sr. IC Managers
See the Cascade Suite →
The Signal Suite
For CHROs and People leaders

You own the listening data, an engagement survey, a pulse tool, a HundredX score, and you need to know what a declining response rate actually means before you present it, without turning it into a document that assigns blame across functions.

CHROs · VPs of People · Change & M&A Integration Leads
See the Signal Suite →
About

Trust doesn't erode all at once. It erodes at every handoff.

I've spent 15 years inside some of the most complex communication environments in corporate America, including M&A integrations, multi-wave reductions in force, sustained reorganizations, and leadership transitions. What I've learned is that communication failure is almost never a writing problem. It's a systems problem.

Messages get diluted, delayed, and dropped because the infrastructure that should carry them doesn't exist. Managers receive a corporate announcement and are expected to lead a team conversation with no preparation. Comms teams triage by instinct because there's no framework for defending prioritization decisions. Employees feel uninformed not because leadership doesn't communicate, but because the last mile never closes.

I build the infrastructure that closes it. And I've started encoding that expertise into tools so it can scale beyond what any one person can do manually.

Work with me →
The manager is the medium.

No message survives a cascade intact unless managers are prepared to carry it. Most aren't ready, not because they don't care, but because the system doesn't support them.

Engagement metrics aren't trust metrics.

Open rates and click-throughs measure activity. They don't measure whether employees believe what they're reading or trust the people saying it.

Prioritization is a communications decision.

What gets communicated when, and to whom, shapes the cumulative load employees absorb. That load is invisible in most organizations until it becomes a retention problem.

AI should amplify expertise, not replace it.

The value isn't the automation. It's 15 years of communication judgment encoded into tools any communicator can use.

The Work

A tool suite I built because nothing like it existed.

After fifteen years navigating mergers, reorganizations, reductions in force, and sustained transformation, I kept running into the same gap: the infrastructure to carry communication to the people who needed it most didn't exist. I built manager guides by hand. I defended prioritization decisions with no framework. I watched trust erode at every handoff point with no tool to show leadership what was happening or why. So I built the Cascade Suite, a set of tools designed and built by me that encodes what I've learned about where enterprise communication breaks down and what it takes to fix it.

The organizing principle
"Trust erodes at every handoff point in the message chain. Every tool in this suite targets one of those points, because I've lived inside each of them."
Tool 01
Cascade
Helps managers prepare to cascade enterprise messages to their teams. Takes any corporate announcement and generates a plain-language summary, ranked questions employees will ask, and a ready-to-run huddle playbook.
● Live View tool →
Tool 02
Prioritization Engine
Scores communication requests against a dynamic model of organizational reality. Surfaces reputational risk, audience load, and time sensitivity. Gives comms leaders a defensible prioritization record over time.
● Live View tool →
Tool 03
Quarterly Dashboard
The output layer of the Prioritization Engine. Surfaces patterns across the queue over time, including what types of requests dominated, which audiences absorbed the most load, and what the data says about organizational trust trajectory.
● Live View tool →
Tool 04
Measurement Layer
Closes the feedback loop between communication output and trust trajectory. Moves measurement from activity proxies to defensible trust signals: manager confidence scores, clarity pulses, and verbatim sentiment shift.
● Live View tool →
Your data stays yours. Every engagement is confidential to your organization; nothing you share gets pooled or resold. What does improve with time is my own judgment: sharper benchmarks, better scoring calibration, and a stronger sense of what a defensible measurement protocol looks like, built from having done this work across more than one organization.
Signal Suite

Silence is data. Most listening programs never read it that way.

Every CHRO I've worked with owns a listening program: an engagement survey, a pulse tool, sometimes both. What most of those programs don't do is tell you what a declining response rate actually means, or protect a leader from turning listening data into a document that assigns blame across functions. Signal Suite reads organizational listening data the way I'd read it walking into the room. Participation is a signal in its own right, not a footnote on the sentiment score, and every finding is framed as what leadership can do next, not who's at fault.

The organizing principle
"A dashboard shows you the score. It doesn't tell you what it means when a third of the room went quiet. Signal Suite does."
Tool 01
Trust Signal Interpreter
Turns listening data, from a HundredX pulse, an engagement survey, or any periodic check-in, into a one-page executive brief. Reads participation and non-response as signal in their own right, not just a footnote on the sentiment score.
● Live View tool →
Tool 02
Loop Closer
Closes the loop after a listening cycle with a "you said, we did, what's next" narrative, scoped to what HR and People teams actually control. No promises the organization can't keep.
Planned
Tool 03
Manager Conversation Guide
Extends manager preparation into the post-listening layer: what leaders say to their teams once results are in, translated the same way Cascade translates a leadership announcement.
Planned
Thinking

Playbooks built from the inside

These aren't frameworks assembled from theory. They're documentation of what I've watched fail, and what I've built to replace it, drawn from more than a decade of high-stakes organizational change.

Playbook
M&A Integration Communications

What actually breaks during an integration isn't the announcement. It's the six months after it, when employees are waiting for certainty that isn't coming and managers are expected to hold the room without answers. This playbook maps the communication architecture that keeps trust intact through that window.

M&A Change management Trust architecture Manager enablement
Get the playbook →
Playbook
IC Measurement That Actually Measures Trust

Most communications measurement tells you what people opened, not what they believed. This playbook builds a defensible measurement stack from the ground up, using manager confidence scores, clarity micro-pulses, town hall question analysis, and voluntary attrition as a lagging trust signal.

Measurement Trust signals Employee listening IC strategy
Get the playbook →
How Engagements Work

A foundation phase, then an ongoing partnership.

Engagements start with a defined foundation phase, not an open-ended retainer. That gives us both evidence before committing to an ongoing relationship.

Phase 1 · ~3 Months
Foundation

An assessment of where trust is breaking down in your message chain, followed by the first infrastructure built to close it: a manager enablement strategy, a prioritization framework, or a listening interpretation layer, depending on where the gap is worst.

Ongoing
Monthly retainer

Once the foundation is in place, the relationship converts to a monthly retainer: maintaining the infrastructure, adapting it as the organization changes, and extending it into the next handoff point that needs attention.

Scope boundary: engagements cover internal communications infrastructure and the organizational listening layer that feeds it. Broader HR portfolio work, compensation, benefits administration, or general HR operations, sits outside this scope and is handled through separate, client-specific arrangements.
In Practice

Recovering trust after a reduction in force.

Situation

Employee trust had dropped more than 100 points on the company's pulse measure following a reduction in force, with continued organizational transformation still ahead. Leadership needed a way to rebuild credibility without pretending the disruption hadn't happened.

Action

Designed a manager enablement strategy built around increased all-hands cadence, direct CEO storytelling, and employee recognition, giving managers specific language for the conversations their teams needed to have.

Result

Fifty eNPS points recovered within six months, measured through the company's ongoing pulse analytics, while the organization continued to navigate multiple years of further transformation.

What People Say

From the people I've worked with

Heather has done an outstanding job providing excellent communications to the entire Viasat team regarding ViaSat-3 Flight 1 over many months. She coordinated interviews, all hands, and written updates, demonstrating exceptional flexibility in adapting to the challenges of launching satellites. Thanks to Heather for her patience, tireless efforts, and flexibility.
Jim Gosnell
Vice President, Viasat
Heather is a very knowledgeable and skilled communications professional who is able to digest the business climate and strategy to shape key messages that move the needle.
Tracy Polzin, MA, SHRM-SCP
Vice President, People & Culture, Viasat
Heather is an exceptional professional who can hit the ground running on a new business, build great client relationships and collaborate successfully with colleagues. Her ability to drive results across multiple programs simultaneously makes her an asset to any team.
Laurinda Hoffman
Vice President, Waggener Edstrom
Contact

Let's talk about what you're navigating.

I work with communications leaders and CHROs at organizations going through the kinds of change where getting communication right is the difference between trust holding and trust breaking. If that's where you are, I'd like to hear about it.