Our Team

Cynthia Mufarreh

Founder and Managing Director

Cynthia Mufarreh is Managing Director of CAM Comm. Cynthia’s experience and insight into how organizations function from the breakroom to the boardroom inform her belief that strategic communication is at the heart of business success, especially for companies in change and growth modes. Her experience across a range of roles and industries gives her a rare 360 degree understanding of how organizations function, integrating the whole of a company from culture to operations. Cynthia’s ability to ensure that all aspects of an organization’s communication are effectively in sync drives leaders across fields to seek her expertise.

Representative Projects

CAM Comm’s client portfolio extends across privately held organizations, publicly traded companies, and international NGOs, and its work represents our breadth of experience across business functions, allowing us to step in and create communications that fit each organization’s culture and dovetail easily with its existing processes and paradigms.

Communications during rapid growth. CAM Comm created a communications paradigm designed to accommodate the needs of an expanding organization experiencing rapid growth through acquisitions. This work ensured that growth felt organic, unified, and sustainable. CAM Comm forged a strategic framework for communications across the enterprise and developed the internal plan to relaunch corporate identity under a single, powerful brand, alerting external stakeholders to new opportunities under the parent brand and uniting internal constituents through a shared sense of mission and vision.

Adoption of new technology across a global organization. CAM Comm developed a strategic communication plan to integrate new technology into a company’s daily work, transforming data strategy and analytics into tools for growing the business and improving client experience. The plan foregrounded the benefits of the new strategy to employees and clients, accelerating the transition to the new data culture and generating enthusiastic participation.

Transitioning an NGO from founder-based to international powerhouse. Cynthia served as a long-term advisor to the founder and CEO of an NGO ready to transition from a founder-based organization to an entity capable of longevity and consistent, efficient operation. She developed an approach for telling the organization’s global impact story that resulted in numerous multimillion-dollar infusions of tech funding.

Turning a vision into a functional organization. Working with an early-stage foundation, CAM Comm translated the founder’s vision into a functional strategy for its initial growth period, including building systems to achieve operational, regulatory, financial, and human resources efficiency designed for easy upscaling.

Reframing complex information to make sense to the wider world. Working with scientists at the top of their field, CAM Comm translated the organization’s work from the laboratory to the layperson in preparation for a global stage on a matter of universal urgency.

Making scholarly data meaningful and persuasive. CAM Comm planned and composed high-level talks on a sensitive issue with broad ramifications, refocusing complex scholarship to be accessible to wider audiences, driving involvement and action.

Maintaining communication and operational equilibrium during COVID. CAM Comm worked with multiple organizations to help them maintain discipline and operational consistency during the COVID-19 pandemic, adjusting processes to adapt to new working conditions and realigning measurements to understand impact.

 

The Predictive Index

Cynthia’s work with The Predictive Index, a best-practices behavioral assessment, uses data to identify, interpret, and integrate key factors that pinpoint how people work, collaborate, process information, and make decisions. Consulting exclusively at the Board and C-suite levels, Cynthia coaches leaders in their application of these factors when there is a mission-critical goal. Working either with individual executives or within a team dynamic, Cynthia identifies critical characteristics of seated board members and executives as well as consulting on the specifics of the role profile when positions need to be filled. The Predictive Index analysis and subsequent identification of strategic opportunities for growth allow executives to understand and either leverage or balance their own inclinations and blind spots to bridge gaps, build trust, enhance productivity, and put the “right people in the right seats” when viewing their organization as a whole.

 

Experienced Leadership

Prior to founding CAM Comm, Cynthia rose to the executive ranks in banking across 27 years, developing a reputation as a strategic problem solver.

  • As Chief Community Reinvestment Officer, she devised the strategy and made the decisions necessary to ensure excellence in performance, including establishing a high operational standard for low-to-moderate income programming; annually translating into credits of $1.5B in small-business lending, $836M in community development loans and investing, and $440M in mortgage loans per calendar year. During her tenure, federal regulatory performance was upgraded to an Outstanding rating – achieved by fewer than 10% of U.S. banks – and continued for a second consecutive term, fast-tracking regulatory approval of sizable business expansion.
  • As the lead global integrator of a communications team hand-selected to develop an internal brand revitalization strategy, Cynthia headed the development and execution of comprehensive employee engagement plans impacting 46,000 employees, leveraging state-of-the-art technologies and best practices to create an aligned, supportive, and enthusiastic workforce.
  • In a customized leadership role, Cynthia developed the communication strategy for a national division’s priorities, including employee engagement, customer experience, and business results, with particular focus on long-term, sustainable growth. 

Cynthia earned her MBA from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada. She is certified as a Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR).

She is committed to civic leadership, serving on the Board of Trustees’ Executive Committee for Merit School of Music in Chicago, and as a Board member of the International Women’s Forum Chicago. She supports several arts and education initiatives in Chicago and in Rwanda.

Cynthia is based in Chicago where she cherishes being the cool auntie in her large Middle Eastern family.