Martin Foley has spent his career helping organizations communicate across teams, locations and audiences.
Martin Foley, MA
Founder, 538 Creative
Ollie Foley
Chief Good Boy Officer
Ollie supports 538 Creative through regular walks, office supervision and timely reminders to step away from the screen. His primary responsibilities include morale, neighborhood research and making sure Martin leaves the house occasionally.
Martin is a strategic communications practitioner whose career has spanned internal communications, employee engagement, executive communications, utilities, K–12 education, public agencies, college athletics, and journalism.
Across those settings, one pattern kept resurfacing. Organizations that communicated constantly, in every channel available to them, still had employees who felt uninformed, unheard, or disconnected from where things were headed. More messages weren’t solving it, and sometimes, even better messages, on their own, didn’t either.
538 Creative treats organizational disconnect as an organizational question first and a communication question second.
Education
Martin holds an MA in Strategic Communication & Leadership from the University of West Florida and is currently pursuing graduate coursework in Industrial-Organizational Psychology through Harvard Extension School.
Reaching 8,000+ employees across 60+ locations
Martin spent several years supporting internal communication at SoCalGas, a utility with more than 8,000 employees across more than 60 locations, including office staff, field crews and frontline teams working different schedules and different levels of access to company systems and information.
That work involved mapping how information needed to travel to reach every one of those groups, then organizing channels, cadence and manager involvement around that map.
“Distributed workforces need communication designed around how employees work.”
Employees
Locations
Operating principles
Diagnose before prescribing
Understanding what’s happening comes before choosing a tool to fix it.
Employee experience as evidence
Employee experience provides important evidence about how communication is working. What leadership intends to communicate matters less than what employees experience, understand and trust.
Distance changes how communication travels
A message travels differently depending on how far an employee sits from where it originated: organizationally, physically or psychologically.
Not every problem is a communication problem
Sometimes the honest answer is that better communication won’t fix what’s broken.
Work directly with Martin.
Martin remains involved throughout discovery, strategy and implementation, providing continuity across the engagement. That continuity means direct access to Martin and consistent context from diagnosis through delivery.
Selected Experience
Sectors that have shaped Martin’s approach to internal communication, before 538 and since.