Heather McElrath has spent the last few years teaching PR Essentials at Borough of Manhattan Community College, working with students of all ages who are building careers in a communications landscape that looks very different from the one that existed a decade ago. This year, the framework she teaches found a wider audience.
McElrath, founder of Sandbox Communications, a boutique marketing communications agency in Virginia, co-authored “Speak Your Way to Sales: Expert Strategies to Turn Speaking into Sales, Clients, and Growth” (Eaton Press, 2026), contributing Chapter 5: “Stop Chasing Gigs, Start Attracting Them: The PR Playbook for Speakers.” The book launched during Women’s History Month as part of a 10-author collaboration designed to help small business owners turn speaking into a sustainable revenue strategy.
The connection between what she teaches and what she wrote isn’t coincidental. “PR is infrastructure,” she says. “That’s what I try to help students understand, and it’s the same thing the book is built around. Visibility without the systems to support it doesn’t convert into anything lasting.”
Her PR Essentials course weaves together traditional media relations and modern digital tools, SEO, social platforms, content strategy, because that’s the environment her students are stepping into. According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report, audiences now discover content across a wider range of platforms than ever before, which means communications professionals need fluency across the full ecosystem, not just one channel.
“The next generation of PR professionals won’t be pitching to just newspapers,” McElrath says. “They need to understand how all of it fits together.”
That integrative thinking also runs through her professional work. Over the course of more than 40 moves across seven states, McElrath worked across fintech, non-profits, government, and agriculture — industries with very different cultures and very different ways of building trust. What carried across all of them was the value of credibility that’s built steadily, not chased.
Her chapter in “Speak Your Way to Sales” reflects that same patience. The speaking industry, she notes, tends to reward those who’ve done the behind-the-scenes work — and penalize those who haven’t, regardless of how strong their presentation is.
“Speak Your Way to Sales” is available now on Amazon in ebook and paperback. More at eatonpress.com/speak-your-way-to-sales.
