From Local Leadership to Global Impact
Laura Stengrim finds new challenges — and a global perspective — at DigiKey.
Laura (Anderson) Stengrim, ’07, loved her job. For 14 years, she served as executive director of Visit Thief River Falls, a role she said perfectly matched her interests, personality, and skills. “It fit me,” she said. “There was so much freedom. I was the only staff member, working with a 13-member board of directors.”
The one problem: there was nowhere to grow.
As she looked toward the next chapter of her career, one company stood out. Through her community work, Laura had developed strong relationships with DigiKey, the global distributor of electronic components and automation products headquartered in Thief River Falls, Minnesota.
“I knew DigiKey would be the best next step for me,” she said. “It has such a wonderful reputation for how leadership treats team members, the benefits it provides, and its connection to the world.”
Although she’d worked alongside DigiKey for years, joining the company’s 5,000-person workforce was “eye-opening.”
“I had never really understood the company’s global impact,” she said. “Basically any company that has electronic parts is a DigiKey customer. We sell our products to companies that literally change the world in industries such as medical, aerospace, automotive and automation.”
Without an engineering or technology background, Laura had to quickly learn how customers use DigiKey’s products.
She drew on her communications expertise, the strong educational foundation she built at UND, and DigiKey’s collaborative culture to get up to speed. Early on, she managed the company’s public relations agency, whose team helped her understand the industry. Today, she leads DigiKey’s Communications Center of Excellence, which includes public relations, internal communications, social media, and public affairs.
“There’s always a team to lean on, brainstorm with and solve problems with,” she said. “That made the transition much less overwhelming than you might think.”
Laura Stengrim (middle) recently attended a Public Relations Society of America conference, a full-circle moment. She recalled attending a Public Relations Student Society of America conference while attending UND.
Her favorite project traces back to her first-day tour of DigiKey’s product distribution center where she observed the scale of its operations and wondered, “Why don’t more people know about this?”
That question sparked a customer storytelling campaign, which she and her teams are developing to show how engineers use the company’s products to solve real-world challenges.
Four years later, she’s still learning. “The communications skills transferred,” she said. “What I had to learn was the business.”
It’s exactly the challenge she was looking for.
