With 30 years of public relations experience across multiple sectors, West West, APR, FPRCA, delivers competitive impact for organizations she serves, through the power of strategic management, data-driven communication, and principled advocacy.
West’s career has included strategic communication posts in corporate and financial sectors, as well as 15 years of entrepreneurship and award-winning work as a PR agency owner / founder, prior to selling her firm in 2018. She holds a bachelor’s degree in public relations / journalism from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where she was awarded the UT Chancellor’s Citation and “Public Relations Student of the Year” honors in 1994 and later was bestowed UT’s “Public Relations Alumna of the Year” in 2013 as the award’s first-time honoree.
Well-known across the global PR industry as a long-term whistleblower of misconduct and ethics code violations, West has built an international reputation for change-agentry. Her independent research and PR industry advocacy have focused on taking a public stand for communication and business ethics, non-profit financial disclosures, whistleblower protection, and anti-retaliation.
Her insights and commentary on public relations best-practice, ethics, and workforce issues have been included in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, the USA Today Network, Business Insider, PRweek, PR News, Strategic, and other business publications. West has spoken at conferences across the United States and internationally in Belgrade, Davos, Dubai, Paris, Prague, Vienna, and Warsaw, including at the European Business Ethics Forum, the International Communications Consultancy Organization Global Summit, and the International Association of Measurement and Evaluation of Communication Summit.
A fellow in the London-based Public Relations and Communications Association (PRCA), West has forged international partnerships to evaluate and measure baseline ethical standards in the PR sector. In 2023, West released a first-of-its-kind PR industry ethics code white paper, in partnership with original research she commissioned by the London-based Institute of Business Ethics (IBE) to encourage universal best practice.
West is an academic research philanthropist currently funding PR industry research on ethics tied to the concept of “organizational gaslighting,” a term she coined to spotlight unethical “PR” manipulations that must be rejected by industry leaders and practitioners. She also is a philanthropic benefactor of numerous higher education institutions in South Carolina and Tennessee.