About Mary Beth West, APR, FPRCA
Mary Beth West delivers competitive impact for organizations through the power of strategic management, communication, and relationship-building – helping executive teams build credible, trust-driven reputations with diverse stakeholders who are mission-critical to financial success.
She serves as a contract senior strategist for U.S.-based Fletcher Marketing PR and invests much of her time with philanthropic work focused on advancing the public relations industry and workforce development.
Mary Beth serves on the board of the London-based International Communications Consultancy Organisation (ICCO) and was awarded the international PRO PR GLOBE Award in Croatia in 2023.
Mary Beth’s commentary has been included in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, the USA Today Network, Business Insider, PRweek, PR News, Strategic, and other business publications. For two years (2021 and 2022), she was listed by global media analytics firm Commetric as one of the world’s top Twitter Influencers on the topic of public relations measurement.
The University of Tennessee honored Mary Beth as its Public Relations Alumna of the Year in 2013 – the first time the honor was bestowed, some two decades after faculty from UT’s College of Communication & Information named her as its 1994 Sammie Lynn Puett Public Relations Student of the Year and 1993 honoree of the J. Carroll Bateman Award. She was also a 1994 recipient of the UT Chancellor’s Citation for Extraordinary Campus Leadership and Service and served on the UT-CCI Dean’s Student Advisory Council.
Half of her 30-year career included entrepreneurship as founder of her own award-winning public relations consultancy, including clients such as Oak Ridge National Laboratory / Spallation Neutron Source, Smoky Mountain Tourism Development Authority, and Alcoa Inc. / Arconic. Her clients also included an array of grassroots advocacy campaigns producing measurable results in arenas such as promoting higher educational attainment in rural Tennessee and energy-conservation initiatives for investor-owned utilities across the U.S.
In recent years, Mary Beth has built an international reputation for change-agentry – particularly in matters related to taking a public stand for communications and business ethics, non-profit financial disclosures, whistleblower protection, anti-retaliation, and inclusion of women and professionals of color in board-level and executive leadership.
She is the signature donor to the Washington, D.C.-based Ethics & Compliance Initiative’s ESG (Environmental / Social / Governance)-focused Business Integrity Library – a searchable database of ESG reports and best-practices from more than 150 of the most significant companies in the world.
A co-founder of Fletcher Marketing PR’s “Ms. InterPReted” PR Podcast, Mary Beth’s industry voice has helped dispel myths and misunderstandings about public relations, PR ethics, digital media, marketing to women, and larger strategic management issues.
The London, U.K.-based Public Relations and Communications Association (PRCA) – the world’s largest professional PR industry association – named Mary Beth as a Fellow (FPRCA) in summer 2022, following her prior appointment as a founding member and co-chair of the PRCA’s Global Ethics Council.
A graduate of Leadership Knoxville and Leadership Oak Ridge in East Tennessee and Young Leaders Council in Nashville, Mary Beth has served on scores of non-profit and business advisory boards, most recently including Nurture the Next and First Horizon Bank.