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THE VIEW FROM HERE


Solving the "Accidental Publisher" Problem
I've spent enough time working with healthcare organizations, school districts, associations, and municipalities to recognize a common challenge: most of them need to publish, but none of them are actually publishers. They produce manuals, training materials, educational resources, community reports, and technical guides. Publishing isn't optional—it's essential to their mission. But here's the problem: building and maintaining an in-house publishing operation pulls resources

David Brake
Feb 182 min read


S4Carlisle Publishing Services and The Grandview Group Announce Strategic Collaboration
Full Spectrum "Back-Office" Publishing Services [Phoenix, AZ / Chennai, India]—February 10, 2026 —S4Carlisle and The Grandview Group today announced S4CGV , a strategic collaboration that provides professional associations, local governments, and healthcare organizations with in-house publishing capabilities without the expense and complexity of building or maintaining in-house teams. The collaboration addresses a critical challenge facing organizations today: the need to pub

The Grandview Group
Feb 113 min read


Are Focus Groups Dead?
What Every "Publisher" Should Know In today's data-driven publishing world, many organizations have convinced themselves that focus groups are relics of the past—old-school research methods rendered obsolete by sophisticated analytics, AI analysis, and mountains of quantitative data. After all, why gather a small group of people for conversation when you can analyze thousands of data points with the click of a button? The short answer: Because numbers tell you what customers

David Brake
Jan 305 min read


The Power of Micro-Audiences for Publishers
Why Building Your Tribe Beats Traditional Social Media Every Time In today's hyper-connected digital landscape, conventional wisdom suggests casting the widest possible net across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google Ads to capture potential customers. Yet, this approach increasingly yields diminishing returns as algorithms become more complex and feeds more crowded. However, there's a compelling alternate strategy that beckons back to marketing's most fundamental princi

David Brake
May 7, 20255 min read


How Well do Christian Publishers Know Their Audience?
Jeff Crosby, CEO of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, shared a powerful insight with Publishers Weekly in an April 2022 article titled How Religion Publishing Became a Billion-Dollar Industry : Publishers need to meet readers where they are, not where they wish they are. His prescient observation punctuated one of the article’s main points, that Christian publishers must now seriously consider “the views of readers who are increasingly detached from traditio

David Brake
Apr 18, 20242 min read


So, You are Listening, but Do Your Stakeholders Feel They are Being Heard?
Most of us were taught the importance of listening in kindergarten because listening is part of the learning process. It is an essential and durable skill. We must learn to listen, so we can listen to learn. In today's business environment we have fancy phrases and sophisticated methodologies for listening to our stakeholders (customers, constituents, employees) including: User Experience (UX) Stakeholder Journey Maps Advisory Panels Surveys, Polls, and Reviews Focus Groups

David Brake
Jan 15, 20242 min read


Are You Really Listening to Your Stakeholders?
For the last several years, my company has engaged thousands of parents, teachers, administrators, students, and community partners in interviews, focus groups, and other feedback activities. Among the questions I have asked them is this: “Does your school district (or organization) listen to you?” On the surface, that might sound like a dumb question. Afterall, if they are participating in a focus group or one-on-one interview, doesn’t the activity itself constitute clear p

David Brake
Sep 20, 20232 min read
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