About
Hello!
I’m David Cumming, a communications strategist, creative leader, and former wilderness/camp professional helping leaders, teams, nonprofits, and mission-driven brands communicate with clarity when it counts.
My work lives at the intersection of story, trust, and systems. I help organizations name what matters, organize the proof, and carry the message across the places people encounter it — websites, campaigns, speeches, hiring materials, internal communications, donor updates, public moments, and the everyday language that helps a team move in the same direction.
Over the years, I’ve worked across global companies, national nonprofits, outdoor organizations, founder-led teams, and small mission-driven shops. The settings have changed, but the work has stayed remarkably consistent: understand the terrain, tell the truth about the conditions, make the plan legible, and help people move with confidence.
Stories need stewards
Stories are how people understand what an organization believes, what it is asking of them, and whether it can be trusted.
A good story does not flatten the complexity. It gives people a way through it.
That is why I think of communications as stewardship. The work is not to decorate the trail. It is to help people find it, understand it, and trust where it leads.
Stewardship asks for care. It asks for judgment. It asks for a willingness to protect what is true, even when the simpler version would be easier to sell.
That is the kind of communications work I care about.
Where this comes from
Before much of my work happened inside strategy docs, launch plans, websites, and executive briefings, it happened outside.
Mud on boots. Radios crackling. Weather shifting. A group moving through uncertain terrain together.
Wilderness trips and camp leadership taught me that clarity is not cosmetic. It is operational. When conditions change, people need calm language, trustworthy information, and a plan they can carry.
The best leaders I learned from were not the loudest people in the group. They were the ones who could read the conditions, tell the truth, make a good call, and keep the group oriented toward one another.
That experience shaped how I think about communications. Whether I’m supporting a CEO, building an employer brand, shaping a nonprofit campaign, rewriting a website, or helping a team communicate through change, I’m still doing a version of the same work:
Clarify the terrain.
Protect what’s true.
Help people move.
How I work
I’m useful when the work requires both judgment and making.
I can sit with ambiguity, ask the sorting questions, find the narrative shape, and turn it into materials a team can actually use. I like the middle space between advisory and execution: close enough to strategy to understand the stakes, close enough to the work to ship the thing.
That often looks like:
Helping leaders clarify what they mean before they say it publicly
Turning scattered inputs into a coherent message architecture
Building a campaign narrative that can stretch across channels
Translating organizational complexity into clear website copy
Creating communications systems that reduce one-off scrambling
Developing executive voice, thought leadership, speeches, and briefing materials
Shaping employer brand and internal communications around what is actually true
Helping mission-driven teams communicate with more confidence and less noise
The common thread is practical clarity: communications that help people understand the stakes, make decisions, and move with confidence. I care less about sounding impressive and more about building language, systems, and materials that can survive contact with real people.
If you’re here because you’re hiring
I’m especially interested in communications roles where strategy, executive partnership, brand narrative, and hands-on execution meet.
Strong-fit lanes include executive communications, corporate communications, brand communications, content strategy, employer brand, internal communications, nonprofit communications, thought leadership, campaign strategy, and communications systems.
I’m at my best when a team needs someone who can help clarify the message, advise leaders, build the plan, and write the materials that make the work easier to carry.