Candace Muggerud’s résumé seems, at first glance, to have been assembled by two people sharing one very tidy desk. One is a banker: a finance graduate, a former president of U.S. Bank in Bismarck, a senior vice president who oversaw small-business markets in two states, and now the chair of a bank audit committee. The other is a media builder: chief executive of a creative company, co-founder of digital communication networks, executive producer of an award-winning documentary. The surprise is how naturally the two halves fit. Both are concerned with trust, distribution and what happens after somebody says yes.
From Bismarck, North Dakota, Muggerud leads KAT & Company, a business founded in 1989 and now described as a positive-impact marketing agency. Its work stretches across marketing, video, design, web and app development, and online learning. The service list sounds like an agency menu. The operating story is more interesting: KAT built channels as well as campaigns. GoodHealthTV, established in 2006, delivers culturally informed programming to facilities serving Indigenous communities. The Living Local Network gives communities their own digital communication infrastructure. Together, the platforms support communities across 35 states.
Plenty of agencies promise reach. Muggerud’s company went to the trouble of installing it.
A banker walks into a creative company
Muggerud is a North Dakota native who earned a B.A. in finance from the University of North Dakota. Before KAT became her professional center of gravity, she rose through U.S. Bank, eventually serving as president in Bismarck and overseeing small-business markets across North Dakota and South Dakota. Banking taught a set of habits that creative firms sometimes learn expensively: promises must survive contact with a spreadsheet; growth needs controls; and a relationship is not a line item merely because accounting places it there.
At KAT, those habits met a different kind of asset. Media has no vault. Its value depends on whether a person notices it, understands it and trusts the messenger enough to do something with it. KAT’s answer was to combine production with durable delivery systems. A campaign might end. A network can keep serving the next message.
The model also explains Muggerud’s curious fluency across fields. Her public work moves between board governance, community engagement, public presentations, film production and agency operations without treating any of them as a costume change. She appears less interested in the romance of reinvention than in the usefulness of transferable skills. A good operator does not abandon the ledger when the storyboard appears. She asks what the storyboard is meant to accomplish, who will see it, and how the whole thing keeps running on Tuesday.
Our goal is to create lasting change in the lives of our clients and the people they serve.KAT & Company
The overlooked room became the channel
GoodHealthTV’s premise was quietly practical. People spend time in community facilities, and that waiting time can carry useful, culturally reflective programming. The screen is not treated as decoration. It is a distribution point, surrounded by local information and sustained by a content system behind it. By 2016, the network was operating in 100 locations. In a 2020 collaboration call, Muggerud described 180 facilities in 30 states. KAT now reports more than 700 locations nationwide.
That progression is a tidy lesson in patient scale. The numbers grew, but the setting remained specific. Each screen still lives in a real place with a particular audience. National distribution did not require pretending that every room was the same.
Muggerud’s public appearances trace the same argument over time. In 2009, she presented GoodHealthTV at a national summit on disparities in communication and access. In 2012, she was the KAT contact for the Dakota Oral Care Workshop, which brought together representatives from every tribal community in North Dakota. In 2021, she and Abby Muggerud presented on innovative technologies for community engagement at a United South and Eastern Tribes conference. The tools changed. The question persisted: how do you make information arrive in a form people will actually welcome?
The work behind the work
Communications companies are fond of the reveal: the launch, the premiere, the moment the curtain lifts and everyone agrees the colors are splendid. Muggerud’s career puts more emphasis on what happens before and after. Partnerships have to be formed. Material has to be produced with cultural knowledge rather than applied cultural decoration. Technology has to stay up. Content has to be refreshed. Someone must notice when the numbers no longer add up.
Her film credit makes the point. Muggerud was an executive producer on American Indian Nurses of North Dakota, created with North Dakota State University’s School of Nursing, Cankdeska Cikana Community College and the University of North Dakota’s RAIN program. The documentary received honors from Sigma Theta Tau International and the American Indian Film Festival. Twenty-five public-service spots were also made from the film and distributed through GoodHealthTV. One production became many useful pieces because distribution was considered from the start.
The company history is a family story as well as a corporate one. Todd Muggerud is identified as KAT’s founder, and the current leadership team includes Abby Muggerud as director of communications. Family businesses can be sentimental in public and highly unsentimental in operation; payroll remains admirably immune to nostalgia. KAT’s longevity - more than 35 years - suggests that affection and accountability learned to occupy the same meeting.
The photograph above catches that combination. Candace and Todd stand outdoors holding an image from the earlier company. It is a picture inside a picture, an accidental diagram of institutional memory. The old equipment is framed. The present-day operators are not.
The audit committee and the edit suite
In 2018, Muggerud joined the board of Choice Bank. She now chairs its Audit Committee and sits on its Executive & Compensation and Governance committees. The appointment did not pull her back into a former life so much as reveal the continuity underneath both careers. Governance asks the same rude but useful questions that good editing does. What belongs here? What does this claim rest on? What have we failed to account for?
She also holds or has held community board roles with the National Association of Community Health Representatives, the Abused Adult Resource Center and the North Dakota Multi-Partner Health Consortium. These are not ornamental affiliations on an agency bio. They place her around tables where communications decisions encounter their human consequences.
Muggerud’s current LinkedIn description is characteristically plain: CEO and managing partner across KAT & Company, GoodHealthTV and Living Local. No heroic verbs. No claim to have disrupted the ancient practice of telling people things. Her company’s own language is warmer. It says the work is built around love for people and the wish to create lasting change. In less careful hands, this might float away as agency perfume. The installed networks, decades of operation and board work give the sentence weight.
Reach is easy to announce. Trust has to be renewed in every room.
Bismarck, deliberately
There is a pleasing resistance in building national work from Bismarck. The city is not borrowed as a picturesque origin story before the action moves elsewhere. It remains headquarters. KAT’s address on North Third Street appears across its corporate, government and network records. The map expanded while the pin stayed put.
That choice matters because communications is often confused with proximity to the loudest market. Muggerud’s career makes a different case: proximity to the work may be more valuable. North Dakota gave KAT relationships, a field of practice and problems worth solving. National scale followed as a consequence rather than a personality.
The company now calls itself a positive-impact agency. The phrase can sound like a category invented at a branding retreat, but KAT’s chronology runs the other way. It spent decades making community campaigns, platforms and films, then acquired the contemporary language for what it had been doing. The label is new enough. The receipts are older.
Muggerud’s achievement is not that she escaped banking for something creative. That would be too simple, and rather unfair to banking. She carried the best parts of one discipline into another: attention to risk, respect for systems, patience with compounding and the knowledge that trust disappears faster than it is earned. In return, communications gave those habits a public face.
A campaign is a promise about attention. An institution is a promise about tomorrow. Candace Muggerud has spent more than three decades building where those promises meet - in Bismarck, on screens across the country, and in the unglamorous machinery that keeps a message useful after the launch party has gone home.