Built for Buy-In: The Fundamentals of Message Design with Tamsen Webster

January 2025 Chapter Meeting | No cost to members | First time guests can attend at no cost by using code: JANMEETING2025

Getting your ideal audience to see your message as right for them—quickly—is critical, especially when there’s so much competition for time, attention, and resources. But what do you do when all the reasons your message is “right” aren’t right for those you’re talking to?

In this practical and energizing presentation, 25-year message strategist and speaker Tamsen Webster will show you how to get people invested (literally and figuratively!) in all you have to offer, starting with the easiest storytelling elements for your audience to identify with: the principles that provide common ground for even the most uncommon messages.

After this presentation, you’ll be able to:

• Understand why challenging people’s beliefs is the enemy of action, and what to do instead
• Clearly and quickly identify who is, and isn’t, an ideal fit for your message—and why—so you can focus your efforts where they’ll have the greatest effect
• Follow a framework for simplifying them to their most important, and irresistible, elements and building in buy-in from the beginning

About Tamsen Webster: 

What do Weight Watchers, ballroom dancing, marathon running, and TEDx Talks have in common? For Tamsen Webster, the answer is, “Me.” For Tamsen’s clients and audiences, the answer is the Red Thread™—the universal tie between how people see the world and what they do in it.

Part keynote speaker, part message strategist, and full-time “Idea Whisperer”, Tamsen uses her proprietary Red Thread method to help audiences, organizations, and individuals build and tell the story of their big ideas. The result? Real, transformative change.

Tamsen’s own Red Thread is woven through more than 20 years as a brand and message strategist. She holds an MBA in Management Communications and Organizational Behavior, an MA in Arts Administration (Public Relations and Crisis Communications) and bachelor’s degrees in American Studies and Marketing—but Tamsen believes she learned the most about inspiring change in her 13 years as a Weight Watchers leader.

As Executive Producer of TEDx Cambridge, one of the largest and longest-running TEDx Talks in the world, Tamsen coached everyone from a 10-year old sartorialist to a pervasive roboticist to a bioethics pioneer to build their RedThreads™ into Ideas Worth Spreading.

Now she’s a globe-hopping keynote speaker on storytelling, branding, change management, and idea development, and a go-to consultant for enterprise companies like Verizon, Johnson & Johnson, and State Street Bank who want their big ideas to have an even bigger impact.

When she’s not in the spotlight—or helping others own theirs—Tamsen pursues (adequate!) ballroom dancing and runs the occasional (reluctant!) marathon. She lives in Boston with her fantastic other half, and two amazing boys with big ideas all their own.