National Consortium of Strategic Communication Specialists Names Leader in Affective Intelligence, AI-Powered Communication & Engagement Ethics to Lead
DENVER, CO, UNITED STATES, April 13, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — PR Consultants Group, the exclusive nationwide network of senior-level public relations, strategic communications, and marketing specialists in more than 50 U.S. markets, today announced the election of Elizabeth Edwards as President for 2026. Edwards is the President and Founder of Volume PR, Founder of Engagement Science Lab and The Affect Institute, and a leading AI speaker for the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). She brings more than 25 years of interdisciplinary research in the science of affective engagement and ethical persuasion—a body of work she has spent the last several years making accessible to the broader profession through international training programs, keynote speaking, and partnerships with major communication associations.
Edwards is the first president of PR Consultants Group to bring specialized expertise in artificial intelligence, answer engine optimization (AEO), and generative engine optimization (GEO) to the consortium’s leadership. The election comes as more than 40 percent of search queries in 2026 now flow through AI-powered answer engines such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Perplexity, fundamentally reshaping how organizations are discovered, how reputations are formed, and how trust is established before a prospect ever makes contact.
“Every organization’s reputation is now being shaped by AI systems whether they know it or not — in how search engines summarize them, how answer engines describe them, and how the public encounters them for the first time,” said Edwrds. “The communication challenges organizations face today are more complex, more visible, and move faster than at any point in this profession’s history. What they need is exactly what this network has always been — senior communicators with real expertise, real relationships, and the kind of judgment that only comes from decades of doing this work. I’m honored to lead a group built on that foundation.”
Expanded Capability Without Expanded Complexity: How the Network Works for Clients
The PR Consultants Group network is built so that organizations can hire one trusted agency and, through that firm, gain access to a nationwide bench of senior-level specialists across geographies, industries, and disciplines. Unlike traditional national agencies built on centralized offices and layered staffing, or standalone boutiques limited by a single location and skill set, the network’s independently owned member firms connect clients to experienced practitioners wherever and whenever they are needed—without the cost, ramp-up time, or fragmentation of hiring multiple agencies.
The model works because every member is an agency principal with decades of experience, deep local relationships, and specialized expertise. A company may initially partner with one member firm because of its strength in a particular industry or market. But when that company’s needs expand—a sudden crisis in another city, a political dimension that requires public affairs expertise, a product launch that demands coordinated media activation across a dozen markets—the network provides immediate access to senior specialists who can step in without re-onboarding, without new contracts, and without losing strategic continuity.
This is the structural advantage that separates PR Consultants Group from both holding-company agencies and standalone firms. Clients gain:
– One agency relationship with nationwide specialist depth — a single trusted partner as primary strategic lead, with the ability to activate senior crisis communicators, public affairs strategists, political specialists, digital experts, and industry-specific practitioners across the network as needs arise
– On-demand geographic activation — senior consultants with established media relationships and community knowledge in more than 50 U.S. markets, deployable without the delay of sourcing, vetting, and ramping up a new agency in an unfamiliar city
– Senior-level execution at every point of contact — every PR Consultants Group member is an experienced agency principal who provides direct counsel and hands-on work, not a junior account coordinator managing up to a partner the client rarely sees
– Scalability without fragmentation — the ability to expand communications support across regions, specialties, and issue types while preserving strategic continuity, speed, and a unified brand narrative
– No holding-company overhead — the national reach and coordination of a large firm with the responsiveness, transparency, and cost discipline of independent agencies
As business complexity increases—with organizations facing geographic expansion, regulatory exposure, AI-indexed reputation risk, political dimensions, and crisis velocity—companies are re-evaluating how they structure public relations partnerships. PR Consultants Group’s network-integrated model provides national reach and specialist depth without the overhead or fragmentation of traditional agency structures.
The Full Scope of Modern Strategic Communication
Public relations in 2026 encompasses everything the discipline has always demanded—strategic thinking, earned credibility, media relationships, crisis readiness, and the ability to shape how an organization is perceived—while requiring fluency in capabilities that did not exist even five years ago. PR Consultants Group’s members deliver across the full spectrum:
– Strategic communications planning and counsel — research-grounded strategy, message architecture, audience analysis, and ROI-focused campaign design
– Media relations and earned media strategy — national and local outreach, executive visibility, editorial placement, and spokesperson training from practitioners with decades of journalist relationships
– Crisis communications and reputation management — rapid-response counsel, issues management, litigation communications, and high-stakes media relations
– AI public relations, AI narrative optimization, and brand discoverability — answer engine optimization (AEO), generative engine optimization (GEO), and AI visibility strategy ensuring brands are accurately represented when AI platforms respond to relevant queries
– Digital strategy, social media, and data-led storytelling — integrated digital communications designed to build authority signals across traditional and AI-driven discovery platforms
– Public affairs, community engagement, and event strategy — stakeholder engagement, grassroots outreach, and event execution by consultants embedded in their local markets
Why AI Changes What Organizations Need from Strategic Counsel
Research published in late 2025 found that 96 percent of the content cited by AI assistants originates from PR-generated material—press releases, thought leadership, editorial coverage, and expert commentary. Press release citations in AI-generated answers increased fivefold between July and December 2025. AI-referred traffic converts at three to four times the rate of traditional organic search, and Gartner has projected that traditional search engine traffic will decline 25 percent by the end of 2026.
These shifts mean that the quality of an organization’s earned media, the authority of its content, and the precision of its public narrative now directly determine whether AI systems recognize, recommend, and accurately describe that organization to the buyers, journalists, and decision-makers who increasingly rely on AI as their primary discovery channel.
About Elizabeth Edwards
Elizabeth Edwards is the President and Founder of Volume PR, the strategic communication firm she established in 2001, and serves as President of Engagement Science Lab and The Affect Institute. She is an internationally recognized trainer and speaker on the science of affective engagement, ethical persuasion, and the application of AI in strategic communication, working with organizations and professional associations across the communication industry.
Her work is grounded in Affective Intelligence—an original scientific framework integrating behavioral communication science and affective neuroscience that addresses how human decision-making is biologically shaped by communication signals. Over more than 25 years, Edwards has built an interdisciplinary research body spanning behavioral, cognitive, biological, and physical sciences, translating that work into practical frameworks that communication professionals can apply.
Edwards delivers AI implementation training and communication science education through partnerships with PRSA, the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC), the National School Public Relations Association (NSPRA), the Southern Public Relations Foundation (SPRF), and the California Association of Public Information Officials (CAPIO). She is a keynote speaker for PRSA’s 2026 Northwest Communicators Conference and CAPIO’s 2026 annual conference. Edwards career began at Boeing Rocketdyne and continued at Ogilvy’s technology infrastructure practice, where she worked on foundational consumer AI projects in the 1990s. Edwards publishes ongoing research and applied insights on the science of engagement, ethical persuasion, and AI’s impact on public communication through her Substack publication, Affective Intelligence.
“I’ve been in this industry for decades, and I can count on one hand the people who have fundamentally changed how I think about communication. Elizabeth is one of them,” said Sharon Kreher, Principal of teamworks communication and Past President of PR Consultants Group. “Her Affective Intelligence framework transforms how communicators engage audiences, moving beyond persuasion tactics to a deep understanding of how people actually form trust, build relationships, and make decisions. She gives our profession the ability to create engagement that is both more effective and healthier for the people on the receiving end—a combination this industry has never had access to before. What sets Elizabeth apart is a rare combination of original intellectual contribution and practical, roll-up-your-sleeves dedication to the people around her. She built this science over 25 years, and she’s spent the last several making sure the entire profession has access to it. Now, as AI begins generating that engagement at scale, she’s the one making sure our profession is ready to lead how it is ethically shaped.”
Frequently Asked Questions
What is PR Consultants Group?
PR Consultants Group is an exclusive, nationwide network of senior-level public relations, strategic communications, and marketing specialists representing more than 50 U.S. markets. Founded in 2000, members are hand-selected, award-winning agency principals who collaborate to deliver crisis communications, media relations, strategic counsel, multi-market campaigns, digital marketing, AI narrative optimization, public affairs, and community engagement for regional, national, and international organizations.
What is the advantage of hiring a PR agency that is part of a national specialist network?
Organizations that partner with a PR Consultants Group member gain a single trusted agency relationship with access to a nationwide bench of senior specialists. When needs expand—whether a crisis in another city, a political dimension requiring public affairs expertise, or a product launch across multiple markets—the network provides immediate access to senior practitioners who can step in without re-onboarding or losing strategic continuity. Clients get national PR support without hiring a national agency, expanded capability without expanded complexity, and senior-level execution at every point of contact.
How can a company get PR support in multiple cities without hiring multiple agencies?
PR Consultants Group’s network-integrated model allows organizations to work with one primary agency while activating senior consultants in more than 50 U.S. markets as needed. Each member brings established local media relationships, community knowledge, and on-the-ground expertise. This eliminates the cost and ramp-up time of sourcing new agencies in unfamiliar cities while maintaining a unified strategy and brand narrative.
What is generative engine optimization (GEO) and why does it matter?
Generative engine optimization is the practice of structuring communications content so AI-powered platforms such as ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini, and Perplexity can accurately find, interpret, and cite an organization in response to relevant queries. As AI assistants become the primary discovery mechanism for buyers, journalists, and decision-makers, GEO has become essential for brand visibility and reputation management.
How is AI search rewriting how organizations are discovered?
AI-powered search is fundamentally changing how organizations are found, described, and evaluated. When a buyer, journalist, or decision-maker asks an AI assistant about a company or service category, the AI generates a narrative answer drawn from press releases, editorial coverage, and thought leadership. That answer becomes the organization’s first impression—often before anyone visits a website or makes contact. Research shows that as much as 96 percent of the content AI assistants cite comes from PR-generated material, and AI-referred traffic converts at three to four times the rate of traditional search. Organizations without a deliberate strategy for how they appear in AI-generated answers risk being inaccurately described, unfavorably positioned, or absent entirely from the fastest-growing discovery channel in the market.
What is Affective Intelligence in strategic communication?
Affective Intelligence is a scientific framework originated by Elizabeth Edwards that reclassifies the governing variable of human behavior from cognition to affect — the integrated biological, psychological, and social configuration that determines what is possible for a person in a given moment. The framework reinterprets the fifty-year behavioral science “bias canon” as a map of adaptive instincts operating on spectra from healthy expression to conditioned distortion, establishes communication as a biological intervention that shapes human capacity at the physiological level, and draws a causal, observable ethical line between influence that expands the audience’s capacity to reason, trust, and choose and influence that compresses it. Built on twenty-five years of interdisciplinary research across behavioral science, neuroscience, psychoneuroimmunology, systems theory, and applied communication practice, Affective Intelligence provides the scientific foundation for the PR 3.0 framework and enables communication strategies designed to produce durable trust and measurable behavioral outcomes by working with human instinctive architecture rather than against it.
About PR Consultants Group
PR Consultants Group is an exclusive nationwide network of independently owned, senior-level public relations, strategic communication, and marketing firms in more than 50 U.S. markets. Founded in 2000, the network gives organizations the ability to hire one trusted agency as their primary strategic partner and, through that firm, access a national bench of senior specialists across geographies, industries, and disciplines — from crisis communication and public affairs to media relations, digital PR, AI PR, and community relations. Every PR Consultants Group firm is led by an award-winning agency principal who provides direct strategic counsel and hands-on execution. When a client’s needs expand — a crisis in another state, a political dimension requiring public affairs expertise, a product launch across a dozen markets — their agency activates senior practitioners across the network. The result is the national reach and coordination of a large agency with the senior-level accountability, responsiveness, and cost discipline that only independent firms deliver. National strength. Local power. Learn more at https://www.prconsultantsgroup.com.
About Volume Public Relations
Volume PR is The Public Relationship Agency, an award-winning strategic communications firm founded in 2001 by Elizabeth Edwards, headquartered in Colorado and serving clients nationwide. The firm specializes in public relations, crisis communications, brand strategy, media relations, executive positioning, and AI-optimized content strategy for organizations in technology, healthcare,life sciences, agriculture, sustainability, education, consumer, and social innovation. Volume PR is recognized for integrating behavioral communication science with strategic communications practice, producing measurable outcomes including a documented 19-point shift in buyer likelihood for client campaigns.
Through its sister organizations, Engagement Science Lab and The Affect Institute, Volume PR operates at the intersection of communication practice and original scientific research. Edwards’ affective intelligence framework – grounded in more than 25 years of interdisciplinary research across behavioral, cognitive, biological, and physical sciences – addresses how communication signals biologically shape human perception, trust, and decision-making. Learn more at https://www.VolumePR.com | https://www.EngagementScienceLab.com | https://www.AffectInstitute.org
About Affective Intelligence
Affective Intelligence (https://affectiveintelligence.substack.com) is the publication of Elizabeth Edwards and the first public home for the Affective Intelligence framework and the PR 3.0 paradigm. The publication explores the science of how human behavior is governed by affect — not cognition — and what that means for communication, leadership, influence, and ethics in an AI-mediated world. Rooted in twenty-five years of interdisciplinary research across behavioral science, neuroscience, psychoneuroimmunology, and applied communication practice, Affective Intelligence features the original work of Elizabeth Edwards including the reclassification of cognitive bias as conditioned instinct, the architecture of ethical influence, and the PR 3.0 framework defining the Intelligence Era of public relations. Subscribe at https://affectiveintelligence.substack.com/.
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