Taking It Global
Want to have an impact on a bigger stage?
How do you make the shift from local planning to global? Being able to communicate the “big ideas” and their relevancy plays a huge part.
Marnie McGregor made the transition. She’s a global urban affairs leader providing government, non-profit and private sector clients around the world with urban-focused public affairs services, including government relations, stakeholder engagement, strategic communications, and advocacy.
We met in the City of Toronto’s planning department when we were starting our careers. Today, Marnie is the Managing Director of Communications & Advocacy, Joint Program, for the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy (GCoM) — the largest global alliance for city climate leadership. She is also the founding Board Chair of Ecogenia — the first Greek NGO to promote sustainability through civic engagement, training, and employment opportunities for young people.
Lisa: Marnie, tell us about your early career path, how you moved from Toronto to New York and then Vancouver, transitioning from a policy planner role into communications and intergovernmental relations in the process.
Marnie: Communications is not a traditional place to land as a planner. I'm not a zoning planner, I'm not doing Committee of Adjustment, I'm not a developer, I'm not doing design. The part of planning that always interested me was the community and communications part of it, how you actually communicate with people affected by the change you're proposing, as opposed to the technical stuff. I took a big picture view on planning issues and applied my planning skills to really broad themes.
Lisa: How did you learn to talk about those big picture planning issues in a way that resonated with people, and eventually led to a more communications-oriented role?
Marnie: I don't have a communications degree, but it was in New York City where I figured out I had an affinity for being able to pull together complex information and package it in a way that supported key messaging. I'm not a marketing or PR expert, but I felt when I was using that skillset with some of the community groups I was working with, and developing talking points and was at community meetings, I got a lot of that from planning. You learn about public consultation and how to engage with the public.
Then I morphed into communications, working on communications projects and websites and board materials, working with different committee members and coalition members and so on. It was a gradual, organic process. Because I had that experience, when I moved back to Canada after New York, that held some sway with some people. I think the nature of the work, the interdisciplinary work that we do in planning, really is a good basis for communications work.
Lisa: Can you elaborate on how you developed those communications skills, and what was most important?
Marnie: The media relations part was most valuable. It was a kind of masterclass in communicating big ideas in language people could understand.
When I first started at the City of Vancouver [after NYC], I was in a traditional planning role, and then got involved in the bid for the 2010 Olympic Games and moved to the host city communications team. I had some really good colleagues there. It was so high profile. We had the Today Show calling for interviews, and CNN and the New York Times. I learned from colleagues, and I took some training courses on being a spokesperson and generally just how to deal with the media. That’s a pretty niche area. I picked up on the skills for dealing with journalists, like the right thing to say (never say “no comment”), and not to run away from the cameras, and where to look so you don’t look guilty of something. It’s higher stakes communication.
On written comms, I'm definitely not the editor you are, or my husband is [Andrew Tzembelicos is an independent professional editor]. I find there is a huge advantage to being familiar with the style and formalities, the tools of the trade. I picked some of those up along the way as well, that I hadn't really been exposed to before.
Lisa: And then you made another leap. You were able to take what you were doing in Vancouver and make connections with the global climate change movement. How did you make this happen?
Marnie: With Vancouver, I was involved in bringing the City into Paris 2015/COP21. I had been in an intergovernmental role and done communications work at that point. The mayor [Gregor Robertson] was the head of the City’s delegation, and I was thrown in as the staff lead. I’d worked on climate and sustainability issues for a long time, like the Greenest City Action Plan, and many community transit projects, including the City’s transit referendum earlier that year. But COP21 was international! It was in Paris that I was exposed, officially, to that whole world of the UN: the processes and the delegations and everything else.
Vancouver was a relatively small city, and it was a Harper federal government. Vancouver was working on the outside because there was no national leadership on climate. We were getting so many international invitations to be part of things, like with the Prince of Wales and Leonardo DiCaprio. Vancouver was putting itself on the map, because of the City’s leadership – the mayor and council, and the staff. We had the 2020 Greenest City Action Plan that had just come up with the Renewable City Strategy, one of the first in North America with net zero targets for 2030 and 2050. I got exposed to the C40 Cities Network and Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy (GCoM) that I'm working with now. These were the kinds of city network partners that we all got exposed to by being in Paris.
I remember seeing the news the next day, at the market when I was still in Paris, that a deal was reached. It was this historic moment when global leaders came together on the 1.5-degree target. It was a momentous time. Obama flew in, John Kerry flew in, they had China, they had India. And that was, for me, a pivotal moment, when I felt the global impact of our work.
Planning, and then working in communications, and intergovernmental relations, was a really good foundation, the place where all of these city issues and networks came together. So how did we punch through, as a relatively small city? The Trudeau [federal] government came in right before the Paris meeting, and they were part of the delegation. The planning work, I think, helped from a policy perspective, as well as respecting the plans and the process that we built. I went as part of the delegation with the subject matter experts, the policy people, but I think the communication side is about how you package that expertise.
Here’s an example. How do you write speaking notes for the mayor when he’s speaking on stage with Sean Penn and Prince William? It’s a chance to test your chops. And then you have to communicate back to the community, in my case, to Vancouver citizens, why we were in Paris. What are we doing there? Why does it matter to you?
There was quite a bit of backlash about us going in the first place, as staff. But despite that kind of thing, we were a tiny but mighty city that was on the global stage when cities weren't really even on the national stage in Canada. We were usually at the kids table. That was our moment where the issues crystallized.
Lisa: I need a breather! I feel like I was there with you. What tools or skills do you borrow from your comms training to apply to city planning issues, like the need to adapt to climate change?
Marnie: From a communications perspective, it's similar to planning, where there's kind of a bit of a formula, right?
In theory, and on a base level, even if it's on the back of a napkin, I would just always do the main things like determining what the core objective is.
And who are your key audiences, that's always a big one, in terms of fine tuning, because it's different depending on whether it's residents, industry stakeholders, media, mayor and council, senior governments, decision makers for funding requests, and things like that.
And then really distilling information – communications professionals are certainly not subject matter experts, but they can take any kind of content and drill down into the nugget, the essence of what it is, what we trying to say.
And ask really good questions. That's the other really important thing, I find that in most of the work that I did at the City, I would be at the table to ask the questions of, say, the engineers or the planners, like “What are you trying to achieve? How do you think this bike lane is going to improve things? Is there an ask?” I don't really need to hear about the engineering or the specific design details, but I do need to know how's it going to function, how it’s going to impact the community, will parking be removed? It’s almost like framing it around the questions you know journalists will ask – the who, what, when, where, and why. And if it’s for a public consultation, I need to know what’s non-negotiable, what’s new, what the value for money is.
Lisa. So here’s a bit of a delicate question for you. Sometimes planners and communications staff don’t understand each other very well. I see the relationship between the two fields, but how would you explain it?
Marnie: I'm sure that I had quite a bit more credibility in those rooms with planners, asking them tough questions, because I have a planning degree. At least I knew where they were coming from.
Most planners I've worked with in the public sector are so passionate, and true city builders, and really committed to what they're doing. And then they don't mean to, but that can come across as kind of, “I know best. I'm the expert.” And I think sometimes they don't like being asked questions, because they're assuming that it’s picking away at the policy or the program or proposal, or muddying the integrity of the work.
I'm actually just trying to get to the heart of the thing, I'm trying to help them package it better. But sometimes there’s a bit of a skepticism about what communications is actually trying to do.
Lisa: Last week’s Substack post was on climate change and how planners can write about it in a way that makes sense to various audiences. What’s a challenge you see in how planners communicate about it, locally and globally?
Marnie: Jargon is a habit that we all get into in every sector. And I'm guilty of it now in the global climate scene. There's just so many acronyms, and so many organizations and assumptions about what people understand. And when it comes to the technical language and info, well, I've watched, as you have I'm sure, too many council meetings where the mayor and council are just sleeping, basically, because there's just too much technical detail. It's a fine balance, because you want to have it, to bolster the case. But most of the time that level of analysis doesn't really help the situation.
It’s hard to extricate yourself from it, right? It’s hard to stand back and say which piece of your work is most important. It's hard to edit your own work. I have a lot of respect for people who can boil things down.
I think it takes a team. Some of the best projects I've worked on is when you're on an interdisciplinary team firing on all cylinders, and you've got people bringing it on the research and the content, and then the technical people, and then you're bossin’ it with the communications, and then you get it out the door and feel a major sense of accomplishment. But it takes the team, with all of their separate skills, to bring it together, looking at things from different perspectives.
Lisa: Are there any particular local plans you were a part that left a lasting influence on how you communicate big issues?
Marnie: In 2009, there was a redo of the 2004-2005 disaster of closing lanes on the Burrard Street Bridge in Vancouver. They tried to close a lane for walking and cycling, an active transportation project. It was just a colossal disaster, the way it had been presented and then the impact. It was gridlock from day one. The City had to do a hasty retreat, it just didn't work.
So then right before the Olympic Games, we had a war room and this big strategy for how to do communications properly. It was easier, but we had tomatoes thrown at us, there was quite a bit of community vitriol back for bike lanes way back, even 10 years ago. The public just wasn’t there yet. Now they’re asking council to move faster – there's a climate emergency, move faster. In the past, there was maybe no messaging in the world that could have fixed the issue, there just wasn't a public appetite for that back then.
Lisa: Thank you, Marnie!
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