SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT
FLEISHMAN-HILLARD WASHINGTON DC

Donna Rohrer brings more than 30 years of experience in journalism and corporate communications to Fleishman-Hillard’s public affairs division in Washington. She specializes in corporate communications planning, crisis management, litigation support, transportation, and national security issues. Her public affairs work at Fleishman-Hillard has ranged from counseling a coalition of maritime liner carriers to successfully defend limited antitrust immunity to advising the nation’s largest railroads on communications surrounding national labor negotiations, to currently serving as a crisis communications expert for a national aviation association. Recently, she has worked with several large national security and defense organizations, helping them reach key audiences in Washington, including the world’s largest nonprofit applied research and development organization.

Ms. Rohrer came to Fleishman-Hillard from CSX Corporation, a global transportation company whose businesses include the largest railroad in the eastern United States, and at the time, the nation’s largest container shipping line, Sea-Land, now part of Maersk, and the largest U.S. inland waterway carrier, American Commercial Lines (ACL). At CSX, she handled investor communications and later served as head of the railroad unit’s corporate communications department. In that capacity, she was responsible for employee and management communications, media relations, crisis handling, litigation support, and general public affairs activities in states and communities throughout the eastern United States. Among the many communications issues she managed was intense media and activist scrutiny of rail shipments of highly contaminated waste moving on CSX rail lines.

In addition, Ms. Rohrer has managed communications for major reorganizations, relocations, and plant closings and worked as a strategic planner on employment issues, mergers and acquisitions. In Washington, on the public affairs staff of the parent company, she worked closely with other large companies on public policy projects for The Business Roundtable and other national business organizations.

Her journalism career began at The Virginian-Pilot, where she specialized in government, environmental, and regulatory issues, and at the Minneapolis Tribune and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. In Fort Worth, she served as deputy metropolitan editor and was responsible for health, science and technology, and environmental coverage, and managed the newspaper’s enterprise and investigative reporting projects.

Ms. Rohrer earned a bachelor’s degree, with majors in both English literature and secondary education, from Longwood College.

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