Barb Iverson is the president of Weber Shandwick’s dominant financial services industry practice group. She works with Weber Shandwick offices around the world to provide seamless service to well-known financial services clients.
Weber Shandwick's Financial Services industry practice group serves clients ranging from MasterCard Worldwide, the U.S. Treasury, Prudential Retirement, Ernst & Young, U.S. Bank and Federated Investors to the Allstate Foundation, LIFE, the Federal Reserve Bank, Cerberus, the Internal Revenue Service, Viewpointe, Bluff Point Associates, Liberty Mutual and SecondMarket. The group has also done major work for ING, CIGNA, Allianz Life Insurance of North America, Star Systems, Deluxe Corporation, Wells Fargo, and for several Microsoft products: Microsoft Transpoint, an electronic bill payment and presentment product later sold to CheckFree, and Microsoft Money and Microsoft Expedia.
Barb has 32 years of communications management experience in business, government and education. Since joining Weber Shandwick in 1996, Barb’s work has involved strategic and integrated communications planning and reputation/brand management, with particular emphasis in the banking, electronic payments, retirement services and insurance industries. Since 2002, Barb has also led a major Weber Shandwick initiative to win and serve key federal government accounts including the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Reserve Bank, the U.S. Treasury's Financial Management Service and the U.S. Census's 2010 campaign.
Barb is the architect of the U.S. Treasury's high-profile Go Direct campaign. Because of its extraordinary success, Go Direct has become one of Weber Shandwick's model campaigns for demonstrating measurement and return on investment. Now in its fifth year, Go Direct is a national initiative designed to get Americans to direct deposit their monthly Social Security and Supplemental Security Income payments rather than receiving paper checks. Ten U.S. offices of Weber Shandwick – along with its research organization, KRC Research, and its multicultural organization, the Axis Agency – are involved in the campaign. The integrated campaign relies heavily on U.S. financial institutions as partners in the Treasury’s quest to convert Americans to direct deposit. The campaign has converted more than 2 million hard-to-reach, hard-to-persuade Americans, far exceeding the government's aggressive goal while also saving the federal government millions of dollars. As an extension of the Go Direct campaign, the Treasury also recently tapped Weber Shandwick for the national launch of a new Treasury-sponsored debit card for unbanked recipients of Social Security. The Direct Express announcement was featured in a front-page story in USA Today and garnered some 150 million impressions with key news outlets in every state.
Before joining Weber Shandwick, Barb directed the Communications Division at the Minnesota Department of Revenue, where she led the development and execution of communication plans that increased compliance with federal and state tax laws. Earlier in her career, she directed the Communications Division at the Minnesota Department of Trade and Economic Development where her division received many national awards, including one that recognized its global media relations work on then–Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1990 visit to Minneapolis. Before that, she held communications management positions at the University of Wisconsin and Montana State University.
Given her years in the industry and in the public relations profession, Barb plays a major role on the national financial services industry scene. PRWeek, the public relations industry’s primary professional trade journal, recently named Barb a “Trailblazer in Financial Services,” and she is often an invited speaker at industry conferences.
Barb, who has done graduate work at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Iowa State University. She currently serves with other Minneapolis business leaders as advisers to Financially Fit Minnesota, a corporate social responsibility initiative that relies on major employers to improve the financial literacy of Minnesotans. Barb is also a member of the University of St. Thomas's Opus College of Business’s Executive Education Advisory Board and of Public Relations Society of America.