Your Fall Regional Preview: Featured Speakers

Nicole Hricik • September 25, 2026

Four Hours. Fresh Ideas. A Lot to Take Back.

This year's NC3C Fall Regional Conference, you'll get practical insights, fresh ideas, meaningful conversations and the opportunity to connect with other local government communicators.


Whether you're a communications team of one or part of a larger department, this meeting is designed to give you ideas, connections and resources you can put to work right away.



Western Regional, Friday, Oct. 2 | Huntersville Town Hall

Western Regional Conference Featured Speakers Fern Blair and Rainah Davis

Huntersville elected officials will kick things off with a welcome to membership and a brief Q& A about how government communicators and elected officials can work together effectively. 


Fern Blair, Graphic Designer with Guilford County, will tackle the topic that's quietly become more urgent: The Darkside of AI. Your staff, leadership and volunteers are likely already using AI tools, whether there's a policy in place or not. Fern will walk through how to spot the red flags, avoid the security risks nobody talks about until it's too late, and, maybe most importantly, how to actually start the policy conversation at your organization before it becomes a crisis of its own.


Rainah Davis, founder and executive creative strategist at Raindrop Creative, knows what it means to be a communications team of one, to lead a small team, and to answer to multiple departments at once, because she's done all three. Her session on content planning and triage will help you move timely information, keep your creative pipeline alive, and build a content calendar that actually earns trust. 


Eastern Regional, Friday, Oct. 23 | Cumberland County EOC, Fayetteville

Bob Jensen, Senior Managing Director of Strat3 LLC and former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, will unpack the why, who and how behind those spreading disinformation, and give you a real strategy to counter it. Jensen has led crisis communications on the ground after the Haiti earthquake, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Hurricanes Ike and Sandy, and more than 30 major disasters for FEMA. He's briefed from the White House Situation Room to combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan. If anyone can tell you how to fight disinformation in real time, it's someone who's done it under the most extreme conditions imaginable.


Ran Northam, Assistant Communications Director for the City of Raleigh and a FEMA-certified Advanced Public Information Officer, is bringing research from FEMA's Executive Public Information Officer Program on The Cost of Cutting Crisis Communication Training. Ran will hand you the risk assessment framework and the data you need to make the case that crisis comms training shouldn't just survive the cuts, it deserves more support.