Mary beth west

With 30 years of public relations experience across multiple sectors, Mary Beth West, APR, FPRCA, delivers competitive impact for organizations she serves, through the power of strategic management, data-driven communication, and principled advocacy. Mary Beth’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, Mary Beth 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. Mary Beth 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 Organisation 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), Mary Beth has forged international partnerships to evaluate and measure baseline ethical standards in the PR sector. In 2023, Mary Beth 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. Mary Beth 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.