Ruth Milligan is the Founder, Managing Director and an Executive Coach and Trainer with Articulation.

After producing the first TEDxColumbus event in 2009, she looked for a partner to help better train the next group of speakers. Finding none, she decided to create the offering in Articulation.

This is no surprise, as her career is like a communication quilt, with many layers, patterns, and expressions of experience and accomplishment.

In her early career, she built an impressive portfolio of experience in politics. By the age of 25, she had worked for Ohio Governor George V. Voinovich, implementing Ohio’s AmeriCorps program, ultimately becoming the Chief of Staff and speechwriter for the First Lady. Her political career also included being a press secretary a national presidential campaign. She then took her talents to the non-profit world as a leadership development director at the United Way of Central Ohio.

In 1999, Ruth desired to return to her passion and primary area of college study: public speaking and communication strategy. She built a successful Public Relations practice inside a growing entrepreneurial marketing agency, and three years later, branched out on her own.

For seven years she ran Milligan Communications as a traditional PR and Marketing Practice. In 2009, she narrowed that practice to coaching and training inside executive communication, structured thought, storytelling, and public speaking. Operating as Articulation, Ruth now spends the majority of her time coaching executives for consequential communications, and creating and facilitating trainings for small groups.

Ruth is perhaps best known in as one of the original curators for any TEDx event (the license program for TED). Since 2009, she has selected and coached over 200 speakers who have taken the TEDxColumbus stage. She is often tapped as an expert in the TED-style of speaking and has authored a class on how to be a TEDx speaker coach. This class, the only one of its kind, is designed to support coaches around the world to help their speakers reach their highest potential.

Ruth is the former Chapter Chair for the Women President’s Organization, Columbus Chapter 2 and graduated from Miami University in 1990 with a B.A. in Speech Communication. Smart Business News honored her as a Smart 50 Columbus recipient and Progressive Female Entrepreneur, both in 2018. She currently lives in Columbus, her hometown, with her husband, Dave Daiber, and their two children, Maggie and Joseph.