DAVE BETKE— SPEAKER & WORKSHOP FACILITATOR
The gap between attention and commitment. The systems that feed it. The roles that defend it. And what becomes possible when you finally close it.
WHAT AUDIENCES LEAVE WITH
Every engagement is designed to produce three things, regardless of format.
Attention in marketing is not a goal. It's a risk — passive, active, or aggressive. Most organizations are already in active or aggressive territory without knowing it.
The questions Dave asks before any tactic is produced. The giveaway diagnostic. The incentive structure audit. Tools that reveal dysfunction without requiring outside expertise to use.
When you stop talking about targets and start talking about heroes, everything downstream changes — how you brief your team, how you measure success, how you deploy resources.
WHY BOOK DAVE
35
years of diagnosing individual systems
7
national marketing awards
65,000
acres saved — the origin of the methodology
While marketing school was teaching people to manipulate targets, Dave was learning what makes people trust, engage, and walk alongside you. That difference surfaced early and proved itself at scale.
"In the early 1990s, I spent five years criss-crossing Canada to save a 65,000-acre endangered forest in British Columbia. No advertising budget. No conventional campaign. I treated students and retailers as heroes in a shared story — and found a third way that gave both the logging community and the conservation movement what they needed."
That forest is now West Arm Provincial Park, protected forever. The principles behind that campaign have never changed. They've driven results across 35 years and every sector Dave has worked in — B2B recruitment, safety programs, nonprofit fundraising, community engagement, festival partnerships, and cause marketing.
He has delivered to international audiences in Las Vegas and Australia, facilitated paid workshops with organizational leaders across North America, and been recognized with seven national marketing awards.
He is the creator of Marketing Triage™, Purpose-Ecosystem™ Design, and the Symbiotic Systems™ Methodology — and the developer of the R.E.A.C.T. model for driving social and environmental action without leveraging shame.
Marketing Triage™ Creator
Purpose-Ecosystem™ Designer
Symbiotic Systems Methodology
R.E.A.C.T. Model of Social Engagment
Founder, Global GreenMeets™
SPEAKING TOPICS
TOPIC 1
Organizations spend 90% of their marketing budgets on the first 5% of the commitment equation. This talk names the dysfunction, shows why it's invisible from inside, and introduces the three risk categories every organization falls into: passive, active, and aggressive.
Best for: Leadership teams · Marketing conferences · Association executives · Nonprofit boards
Topic 02
Most organizations use hunting language without realizing it. Targets. Funnels. Capture. Convert. This session uses the Socratic method and whiteboard co-creation to make the shift visceral rather than intellectual. Participants discover the insight themselves — which means they own it.
Best for: Marketing teams · Communications staff · Fundraising teams · Creative briefing teams
Topic 03
Flowers don't manipulate bees. Neither party is a target. Neither runs a funnel. Both bring what the other needs. This talk explores what symbiotic systems look like in organizational practice — and why the marketing ecosystems that outlast campaigns by decades are built on the same natural law: both sides benefit, or the system fails.
Best for: Sustainability conferences · Regenerative business gatherings · Purpose-driven leadership forums
Topic 04
Marketing waste isn't just a budget problem. It's an environmental problem. Swag in landfills. AI content consuming server energy. Every tactic that generates attention but not commitment produces both financial waste and physical waste. The fix is the same for both — and the planet benefits automatically when organizations build systems that earn commitment.
Best for: Sustainability officers · CFOs · ESG accountability boards · Purpose-driven organizations
Topic 05
Shame doesn't sustain action. Fear creates paralysis. The R.E.A.C.T. model — Relatable, Empowering, Aspirational, Clear path to action, Transformational — is a circular, self-reinforcing framework for driving meaningful behaviour change through invitation rather than pressure. Built from 30 years of campaigns that produced measurable results.
Best for: Government communicators · Nonprofit campaign teams · Sustainability marketers · Behaviour change practitioners
Topic 06
This talk introduces the three types of system failure — missing bridge, misaligned bridge, broken bridge — and the symptoms that distinguish them. Through real cases, including the $150,000 mug, participants learn to recognize which failure patterns live in their own organizations. The diagnosis itself requires individual attention a stage can't provide. What a stage can do is make the dysfunction impossible to unsee and create the appetite to fix it properly.
Best for: CEOs · Executive Directors · Association executives · Anyone who approves marketing budgets and can't connect them to outcomes
SIGNATURE WORKSHOP
Half-day or Full-day · 15–25 Participants
This is the workshop version of the language shift talk — extended, interactive, and built for teams who need to do the work together rather than hear about it from a stage.
The flower and the bee. The pollinators versus targets reframe. The Socratic discovery process that makes participants identify the problem themselves — so they own the insight, not just understand it.
Format is interactive throughout. No lecture-style delivery. Whiteboard co-creation, small group work, and full group debrief.
Opening
The flower and the bee. What does nature teach us about systems that sustain themselves? The Socratic opening that makes the room discover the problem before Dave names it.
Morning
Where is your organization's language right now? The whiteboard audit. Targets versus heroes — hunting language versus invitation language. Participants map their own materials against the framework.
Midday
The giveaway diagnostic. How a $3 item reveals how an organization deploys a $50,000 budget. The incentive structure audit — why everyone is rewarded for the wrong things, and nobody can see it from inside.
Afternoon (full-day)
Participants rewrite their own materials, briefs, and campaign language using the heroes framework. Real work on real problems, guided by the methodology. Small groups present back.
Close
Each participant leaves with one specific change they will make in the next 30 days and the language to explain why to their team and their leadership.
RESULTS FROM THE METHODOLOGY
3×
Senior engineers hired when the goal was one — during a national labour shortage
400%
Above target on community vehicle reduction — LocalMotion, City of Edmonton
25+
Year partnership with the Edmonton Folk Music Festival — 300% sales growth year one
40+
Government shared example with 40+ women's shelters nationwide
FOR INDUSTRY ASSOCIATIONS
Exhibitors pay significant fees to participate in your trade show. Most leave with booth traffic numbers, a stack of business cards, and no way to connect that spend to actual outcomes — hires, partnerships, sales, donations.
When renewal time comes, the conversation becomes: "We spent $50,000 and got booth traffic." That's not a conversation that retains exhibitors. It's the conversation that loses them.
The problem isn't the trade show. It's that exhibitors are spending 90% of their budget on attention — booth presence, giveaways, materials — and almost nothing on the systems that turn that attention into commitment. They don't know it. You don't know it. And the relationship ends at renewal.
"Associations that help their exhibitors prove ROI don't lose exhibitors. They become indispensable to them."
This is a symbiotic system problem. When exhibitors win, associations win. When exhibitors can't prove their investment, everybody loses. The same fix that solves the exhibitor's commitment problem solves the association's retention problem — because they were always symptoms of the same dysfunction.
Delivered as exhibitor value-add · Funded by the association
A keynote or workshop delivered to your exhibitors at or before your trade show. Exhibitors leave with a diagnostic framework for turning their booth presence into measurable commitment outcomes, not just impressions.
The association funds and delivers this as a value-add, which immediately differentiates your show from every other trade show competing for the same exhibitor budget.
FEATURED TALK
Your Trade Show Investment Is Not a Marketing Expense. It's a Diagnostic.
How exhibitors can move beyond attention metrics to build the systems that turn booth presence into measurable commitment — hires, partnerships, sales, and sustained relationships.
Marketing Triage™ for the association itself
When the exhibitor workshop reveals what most associations already sense, that their trade show ecosystem isn't designed to help exhibitors earn commitment, the next conversation is about redesigning it.
Marketing Triage™ applied to your exhibitor engagement system reveals which specific dysfunction is driving churn — missing, misaligned, or broken systems — and what to redesign first. The association becomes a strategic partner in building something both sides benefit from.
FORMATS
60–90 Minutes
Conference sessions, association events, leadership forums. Built around one core provocation and one diagnostic framework. Q&A is integrated throughout rather than held to the end.
2 Hours · Up to 30 Participants
Deeper than a presentation, more focused than a half-day. Typically used for leadership teams who need the diagnostic and a structured conversation about what it reveals in their organization.
3–4 Hours · Up to 50 Participants
The Heroes Not Targets language shift workshop in full. Requires participant pre-work: bring one real campaign or tactic you're currently working on.
6–7 Hours · Up to 25 Participants
The complete diagnostic and redesign experience. Morning: diagnosis. Afternoon: rebuild. Maximum 25 participants for full effectiveness.
As Needed
Available for panel participation or full moderation on marketing systems, sustainability communications, purpose-driven organizational strategy, and behavior change.
By Discussion
Multi-session programs, retreat facilitation, organizational diagnostic workshops. Designed after a discovery conversation about your specific needs and audience.
FOR EVENT & PRESS USE
Feel free to use this bio in event programs, conference materials, and press releases. For a shorter version or custom language, contact us.
Dave Betke is the founder of Do Better Marketing, based in Edmonton, Alberta. He studied psychology, not marketing, and has spent 35 years applying the difference to organizational challenges that conventional marketing consistently fails to solve.
His methodology began in the early 1990s when he spent five years criss-crossing Canada to save a 65,000-acre endangered forest in British Columbia, treating students and retailers as heroes rather than targets, and finding a third way that gave both the logging community and the conservation movement what they needed. That forest is now West Arm Provincial Park, protected forever. The principles behind that campaign have never changed.
He is the creator of Marketing Triage™, Purpose-Ecosystem™ Design, and the Symbiotic Systems™ Methodology, and the developer of the R.E.A.C.T. model for driving social and environmental action. His work has been recognized with seven national marketing awards.
He is also the founder of GreenMeets™, a bi-monthly global gathering of sustainability and regenerative practitioners, and is currently training an AI agent that gives marketing and business advice that considers planetary limits, symbiosis, and even its own energy use.
Dave speaks on the gap between attention and commitment, the psychology of systems that sustain themselves, and why treating people as heroes rather than targets is not just an ethical position — it is the structural reason some marketing ecosystems outlast the campaigns that created them by decades.
Dave speaks to organizations making a positive difference in people's lives, their communities, or the natural world. Nonprofit and mission-driven organizations are encouraged to inquire regardless of budget.
Prefer to reach out directly?
+1 (780) 474 • 6563
Do Better Marketing
(a division of Avatar Brand Management Inc.)
Diagnosing the systems where marketing budgets bleed — and redesigning them so attention becomes commitment, waste becomes mission fuel, and outcomes become predictable.
© 2023 All Rights Reserved
