About Us
Our Why: Use the power of communication to deepen understanding and inspire positive action.
Our What: Professional communications are at the heart of every organisation.
Our How: We advance the profession, create connection and develop strategic communicators.
Our Team
Rowena Morais
President
Rowena is a brand positioning specialist who helps small business owners identify and position their business’s unique value with clarity and confidence.
With over 15 years of experience in marketing and communication, Rowena serves as a Fractional Chief Content Officer, supporting organisations of all sizes with their marketing and communication needs.
The author of “Build a Body of Work”, Rowena is the Founder and Managing Director of Digital Confluence, a boutique marketing and communication firm offering bespoke solutions, including white-label content development, social media management, and communication services, to small businesses.
Rowena is an experienced trainer and facilitator, delivering programs on communication, leadership, media relations, and personal branding.
Rowena also serves as an employability coach, helping mid-level and senior executives with career development.
Pallavi Dutt Singh
Vice President
Pallavi is a motivated communication professional with 20+ years of experience across international markets and Australia in public, private, and not-for-profit sectors. She believes marketing communication is more than a profession. Pallavi joined IABC in a leadership role to celebrate and contribute to the professional community and craft value-driven marketing communication for a wider audience.
With a culturally and linguistically diverse background, she brings varied perspectives to enhance her approach. As a CALD Co-Chair at her current agency, she drives policies to promote a diverse workforce by breaking down barriers and recognising the value in cultural competency.
Pallavi is the founder of Mâtré, a social enterprise reflecting her life philosophy of giving back to society and admiration for traditional crafts. Their vision, ‘re-weaving the fabric of society,’ aims to rejuvenate traditional weaving, printing, and fabric-making through international and cross-cultural collaborations.
Lisa Ranson
Immediate Past President
Lisa relishes opportunities to work with interesting and complex challenges – especially if they improve lives. She is proud to have led communication strategy for high-profile government priorities such as Australia’s COVID-19 vaccine roll-out, and now the Australian Government’s first national child sexual abuse prevention campaign.
Through her career, she has explored dense and sensitive topics such as how language impacts the well-being of veterans and first responders, the effect of automation on employment in the resources sector, and how to build trust in government data practices.
Adele Scandrett
Treasurer
Adele brings 14 years’ experience in strategic government communication, with a focus on health and social services. She has a Master of Strategic Communication, Bachelor of Communications and Bachelor of Arts, majoring in psychology, from the University of Canberra.
Having worked on government campaigns, issues management, media and promotion, she enjoys bringing this breadth of experience together to deliver effective communication strategies. Working for the Australian Government, her passion is supporting people and communities. She enjoys working with colleagues across government and industry to deliver outcomes that matter.
Adele is a firm believer in investing in relationships and continuous growth. As Treasurer of the IABC Canberra Board, she hopes to support networking and professional development within the local community.
Anjali Srivastava
Secretary
As a marketing professional, Anjali has extensive experience building and scaling effective marketing programs within leading tech organisations, spanning semiconductor, SaaS, open-source, and location data domains.
Throughout her corporate journey, she spearheaded numerous strategic inbound and outbound marketing initiatives including creating and implementing strategies to optimise ROI, drive demand generation, and elevate company profiles.
Commencing my career as a communications professional at a PR agency, she brought a robust blend of strategic planning and tactical execution capabilities in public relations, media management, executive communications, and stakeholder engagement. She has successfully driven large-scale external and internal communication and brand programs, events, exhibitions, and employee communication activities. She also possesses expertise in driving ecosystem marketing, product marketing, and content marketing.
Anjali recently founded a marketing consultancy, Nurture Culture, to provide marketing-as-a-service to businesses, large and small.
Angela Clowry
General Board Member
Ange is a Communications leader with experience across communications, engagement, change, learning and organisational design. Her career has comprised more than 20 years across Canberra, Sydney, London, Paris, Singapore and Hong Kong working in agency and in-house.
Ange has supported many Australian and international brands in solving their communications challenges through major transformations and transactions. She has built multi-disciplinary teams and collaborated with third parties to deliver complex programs using creative and dynamic communication strategies and tools. Ange has a special interest in supporting communication functions to transform and make use of next technology to improve outcomes and is passionate about the application of AI in communication and design.
Ange leads the Oceania Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence for EY and is the co-People Consulting leader for EY Canberra.
Kylie Johnson
General Board Member
Kylie is one of Australia’s leading experts on zero emission communication. She is a Churchill Fellowship recipient for her work exploring the communication challenges promoting net zero emission heavy vehicles to industry.
As part of the Fellowship, Kylie attended the United Nations Climate Change conference, COP28 in Dubai, Oxford University, New York, Texas, London, Las Vegas and Sweden.
Kylie has since attended COP29 and is spearheading Australia’s efforts to transition to zero emission technology.
Her other achievements including CSIRO’s chart topping science podcast and highly successful media campaigns that: assured the domestic supply of diesel additive AdBlue secured government funding to digitise records at the National Archives of Australia forced the multi-million dollar recall of a medication from pharmacies across Australia.
Before working in communication, Kylie was a television and radio journalist, most notably for the ABC, BBC, SBS, 2GB and Channel Seven, as an executive producer, presenter, newsreader and researcher.
Katrina Tite
General Board Member
Katrina is a Manager in EY’s People Consulting practice, and has over a decade experience in planning and delivering strategic communications to drive organisational transformation within both the public and private sectors.
She has also been running her own content marketing business, giving her a blended skillset across internal and external communications.
Katrina is dedicated to fostering strong connections among members of IABC Canberra, helping them unlock the full value of their membership to grow and advance as strategic communicators.
Lisa Dobson
General Board Member
Lisa is a Practice Leader of Crisis Communications at Mandiant, now part of Google Cloud. She helps clients better manage risk by providing comprehensive proactive and reactive cyber crisis communication services to customers worldwide.
Working alongside technical teams, she helps clients evaluate risk as incidents unfold and manage all communication activities across their internal and external stakeholders. Lisa advises clients on proactive communications planning, including building crisis communications playbooks and developing and facilitating executive tabletop exercises based on adversary intelligence and best practices developed by responding to the latest attacks.
With over two decades of experience spanning private and government sectors, Lisa is highly experienced developing and implementing effective corporate communication, media management, and stakeholder engagement strategies. Recognised as an accomplished change manager, media, and corporate communications advisor, Lisa specialises in designing and implementing integrated communication strategies.
Working in Australia’s national security environment, Lisa has extensive experience operating in highly sensitive, technical contexts encompassing reactive operational incidents as well as long-term strategic programs.
Learn More About Us
Canberra has hundreds of communications, PR and marketing professionals working in government, not-for-profits, agencies and business. Yet before IABC Canberra was established, no organisation met the needs of people in senior roles as well as those of emerging and independent communicators.
Early years saw the new Chapter concentrating on monthly lunchtime meetings with specially selected guest speakers. Around 20 members gathered for expert insights on topics like Communications for Project Managers, Social Media and Elections, Managing Digital Reputations and Trends in Workplace Communications.
It is marvellous how the titles of the topics sound familiar but the content has so radically shifted in the ensuing years.
A key focus from the early days was sourcing local speakers to meet the unique needs of local communications practitioners, a practice that has continued through the years; however, we also invite experts from elsewhere to ensure members keep abreast of the latest communications trends from around the world.
Today, IABC Canberra has a robust character shaped by the ebb, flow and swirl of communications in Australia’s capital, and the ever-evolving global landscape.
Much of that success can be attributed to the work of past Chapter presidents like Sandi Logan, Brian Humphreys and David Pemberton, industrious members of previous Boards and global and regional leaders with IABC. But mostly it is due to our members: Their skills, knowledge and support are what makes IABC Canberra a network that’s really worth being part of.