Amy Schoenberger is account supervisor and social media specialist at DeVries Public Relations.

As marketers, and especially in PR, our job is to communicate the message of our organization externally. We’re given a narrow set of guidelines and we work within them to create a campaign or mechanism that best represents what we’re trying to accomplish.

But how often do we really take that organization and flip it on its head, questioning the very reason it exists, and making major overhauls in order to ensure the success of its mission?

That was the backbone of Beyond Cause Marketing summit, organized by Scott Henderson and held in Boston on September 16. Each of the 60 attendees were pushed to identify one thing organizations could do better, and one thing organizations need to stop doing in order to really foster and enable change.

Through a heated debate over banana rum (pronounced “banana room”) cake, we questioned whether or not the marketing efforts surrounding cancer walks are effective measures of actually curing cancer, let alone the walks themselves. Over breakout sessions the following morning (led by rockstars Sloane Bennett, Margot Bloomstein and SchneiderMike), we outlined how government organizations, big companies and non profits could work together for the greater good. We watched leaders in our field (Becca Colbagh, Robbie Vitriano, Joe Waters) sit in the hot seat and answer challenging questions from our (very opinionated) moderator, Brian Reich.

Yes, some big ideas were thrown around. Yes, the chances of getting everything we discussed that day actually executed through real marketing campaigns will be close to impossible. But it felt great to be challenged. To be pushed so far out of our comfort zones and to engage in real discussions about how we, as marketers, can impact real social change was invigorating. It was one of the most inspiring conferences I’ve been to, and I look forward to continuing some of the discussions we started there throughout our growing online community.