Keeping it Real with Dawn Kalmar: A Communicator’s Journey to the C-Suite
Dawn Kalmar is unapologetic about the high bar she’s set for her team and agency partners as Stoke Therapeutics’ Chief Communications Officer. That’s because her standards extend far beyond knowing what constitutes quality deliverables. To Dawn, purposefully shaping company reputation and methodically pulling the levers of audience engagement is table stakes. Since joining Stoke in 2019, what fuels her is the forward-thinking strategic work she performs each day to help Stoke become a fully capable, commercial-ready biotech company.
Recently, Dawn sat down with us to share her big-to-small-company career trajectory and “enterprise-wise” insights on how communicators can propel emerging biotech companies forward. (This conversation has been edited and condensed.)
Q: What drew you to build a career in biotech corporate communications?
Dawn: I’ve always been amazed by medicine and the power of healing, but as a natural storyteller who fell in love with communications and journalism at an early age, I knew high science was never going to be my thing. In 1997, my curiosity and love of Biology and my pursuit of a Journalism degree led me to find a college internship opportunity with Genentech. My department interfaced with Legal, Regulatory, Government Affairs, Clinical and Commercial in a way I didn’t know existed. Exploring this intersection of science and communications was eye-opening and set me up for my career
Q: What led you to Stoke Therapeutics?
Dawn: My tenure at Genentech began in 2003 and while I loved the opportunity to help launch Avastin, Lucentis and several other trailblazing products, hearing colleagues’ stories about Genentech’s early days and its starry-eyed team of scrappy, hard-working people inspired me to pursue a role where I could make a broader impact. In 2010, I was recruited by Vertex when it was a 300-person company preparing to launch its first drug – a medicine for Hepatitis C. I helped build out product communications as the company launched its first medicine and began to build the pipeline. When we went through a CEO transition, I took over internal communications and helped shape the company culture for the future. But I still had a thought: what would it be like to have an even broader role in an even earlier stage of a company’s life cycle? Having worked on some of the greatest new medicines, I wanted to find a company with great science and great people. After six months of searching, I joined Stoke and helped bring the company through its IPO and into clinical trials. Five years later, we are advancing towards commercialization.
Q: How did being at a global commercial biotech company prepare you to lead corporate communications at Stoke?
Dawn: Global commercial biotech companies are fully capable entities that come equipped with the resources necessary to get the job done, and I’d been lucky to work with experienced leaders and fully developed departments. But at Stoke, I was employee number 39. My experience and innate journalistic curiosity gave me a keen eye for the future, which meant I inherited the responsibility of building the communications function from the ground up. I’ve learned that when the resources you need aren’t built yet, you must consistently push yourself and your team to do the things that haven’t been asked of us yet.
Q: How have you approached building Stoke’s brand reputation?
Dawn: One of the first things I did when I arrived at Stoke was interview people on their thoughts about the company, and I found there was a disconnect. Each person I talked to had a slightly different elevator pitch about the company and what we were aiming to do with our science. Knowing that the story we tell today could be powerful or problematic as our company grows, it was critical to get alignment and be thoughtful before we continued to expand our communications efforts. I pitched a $100K plan to align around our vision, mission, values and company narrative, which underpins all our communications. It has also been helpful as we have fostered our culture, including with recognition programs and celebrations. The challenge now is to maintain consistency and alignment as we grow. All eyes are watching.
Q: What do you consider the most important audiences for early-stage biotech companies?
Dawn: Investors and employees are the ones paying attention to your efforts in the early stages, and employees in-particular are incredibly powerful. You need motivated employees to win. To attract talent, it was important to us to be clear about what we believed in and what we expected. We distilled the Stoke experience from a business standpoint and found a partner to help us develop durable values that are authentic to Stoke knowing we’d be hiring many more people. If you can unite people around a cause and mission, inspire them to believe in what you’re doing and empower them to communicate it, they become instrumental to building brand reputation.
Q: You started at Stoke before the company had presentable data. How have you navigated the data desert?
Dawn: In the early days, without steady news flow or data readouts, you must be creative to be relevant. At Stoke, we looked for opportunities to differentiate based on leadership and science. Thought leadership can take many forms. In addition to leaning in on our CEO’s track record as a physician-scientist, our co-founder was open to talking about her experiences as a woman, Latina and lesbian. It helped us open doors and create a unique profile for Stoke, giving us opportunities to introduce the company, mission and vision to set the stage ahead of the data.
Q: How has shifting from a privately held to publicly traded company impacted Stoke’s brand?
Dawn: The biggest shift for us has been transitioning from selling a vision to selling our ability to execute, which requires making promises you can keep and setting timelines you can meet. As a small company, we’ve evolved rapidly. That’s what happens if you do things right in biotech, and what makes my career so exciting. At Genentech, the mantra was “Innovate or Die.” Being willing to change and leaning into that rapid pace and constant evolution is key to success and longevity in biotech.
Q: As Stoke has matured, how have your corporate communications priorities evolved?
Dawn: Following the build out of our IR team, we developed our patient advocacy team and contracted support for internal communications. Now, we’re designing for late stage. Our next steps are building out product communications, hiring talent to support product branding, developing our government affairs function, and thinking about how best to expand the use of our digital properties to tell our story, including social media and the website is a big part of these conversations. LinkedIn has been an important channel for us from an employee engagement perspective and as a forum to differentiate ourselves with external stakeholders.
Q: It’s been a tough couple of years for early-stage biotech. What’s your advice for corporate communicators at emerging companies?
Dawn: When you are at a small company and don’t have the money or people resources, ask: What can I do with my limited budget to make an impact? What are the few things we can do well? At Stoke, we’ve tried to focus and pick a handful of opportunities, start with crafting the message to be sound, accurate and scalable. When challenges emerge, it’s best to focus on the future, stay the course and reflect on the core reasons you joined the company, most importantly, the potential to change the lives of patients and families.
Q. When you think about corporate communications as a profession, what are you most excited about that’s on the horizon?
Dawn: There is a growing appreciation in the C-suite and board rooms for the value these roles bring to the table. The best communications people can see the business broadly and work across all functions to identify and help fill gaps. It is really gratifying to me to be able to bring the knowledge I have from working at larger, more established companies with multiple commercialized medicines, to help chart the course for a smaller, earlier-stage company like Stoke. Companies like Genentech and Vertex make it look easy. It’s not just about great science – you also need great people to succeed!
