The first title was Communications Specialist. It was 2011, the same year Deanna Capel graduated summa cum laude from Illinois State University with a marketing degree focused on integrated marketing communication. The job at Busey sounded narrow enough: words, messages, the public face of a bank rooted in Champaign. But communication inside a financial institution is a useful place to learn how the whole machine behaves. Every sentence carries a promise. Every promise eventually meets a customer, an employee or a community partner who can tell whether it is true.
Capel stayed close to that test. In a little more than a decade, her remit widened from communications to creative services, corporate communications, brand experience and then executive responsibility for marketing and experience. Today she is Busey's Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing & Experience Officer. The promotions make a clean timeline. The more interesting story is how the definition of her work kept expanding.
A bank marketer can buy media. An experience executive has to care about what happens after the ad works. The branch visit. The digital handoff. The employee event. The nonprofit partnership. The awkward days around a merger when two sets of customers and colleagues are trying to understand what comes next. Capel's career has accumulated those details until the details became the job.
The sentence-level beginning
Capel arrived at Busey with evidence that she took both craft and service seriously. At Illinois State, she received the Delta Nu Alpha-James Katschke Award in 2010, an honor that considered leadership, service and citizenship alongside academic performance. In 2011, the marketing faculty named her Outstanding Senior in Marketing. She also participated in Beta Gamma Sigma, Gamma Phi Beta and Rho Lambda. Before joining the bank, she had tried two different views of customer work: a management trainee internship at Enterprise Rent-A-Car and a student marketing consultancy with Jack Lewis Fine Jewelry.
Those early roles are small entries on a résumé, but they form a useful triangle. Enterprise teaches operations at the counter. Jewelry retail teaches the emotional side of a high-consideration purchase. University marketing teaches the frameworks and vocabulary. Banking asks for all three: process, trust and a way to explain complicated products without losing the person on the other side.
By January 2012, Capel was Busey's Marketing and Creative Services Manager. In 2014 she became Creative and Communications Director. In 2017, the title shifted again, to Brand Experience Director. The noun kept moving outward: from communications, to creative, to experience.
The widening aperture
A brand that survives contact
In 2023, when Capel was Executive Vice President and Director of Busey Experience, the bank described her scope in unusually concrete terms. It included creative work, customer and associate event execution, media planning, charitable strategy and community relations, all held against the standards of the corporate brand. Read quickly, that sounds like a collection of departments. Read as an operator, and it looks like a chain of custody for trust.
The customer sees only pieces of that chain. A sponsored event on Saturday. A branch conversation on Monday. A message about a product on Tuesday. An employee sees a different sequence. Neither person cares which team owned which moment. Experience ignores the org chart, so someone has to work across it.
“Deanna doesn't just stop there - she can often be found volunteering at events, as well.”
Amy Randolph, Busey Chief Operating Officer, 2023That line from colleague Amy Randolph offers a useful view of Capel at work. Many executives can approve a sponsorship, arrange a photograph or speak about community. Showing up for the volunteer shift is different. It closes the distance between the person who designed the program and the people experiencing it. It also creates a feedback loop that no dashboard can reproduce.
The record lists local places where she has done that work: her children's schools, United Way of Champaign County, the Christie Clinic Illinois Marathon and the Child Care Committee of the First United Methodist Child Care Center. She now serves on United Way's county board. The pattern is not geographic abstraction. It is Champaign at human scale.
When the map gets bigger
Busey has changed substantially during Capel's tenure. Growth and acquisitions have extended the institution beyond its central Illinois roots. Long before she reached her current title, internal communications around the 2015 Pulaski Financial combination directed media questions to Capel and another Busey executive. A communications specialist who stays long enough eventually sees the same problem at different scales: how to preserve clarity when the number of people, products and places multiplies.
The CrossFirst combination made that problem visible again. When Busey announced the deal in 2024, the combined institution was described as having roughly $20 billion in assets and a presence reaching new states across the central and southwestern United States. Capel's public reaction centered on “an incredible partnership and opportunity for our teams, our clients and our amazing communities.” When the acquisition closed in March 2025, she returned to the same three groups: associates, customers and communities.
That triad is a practical checklist. An acquisition can work financially while feeling incoherent to the people inside it. The logo may change in a day; the relationship cannot. Associates need language for the change. Customers need continuity. Communities need evidence that a larger map has not produced a smaller sense of obligation. A chief marketing and experience officer sits where those needs overlap.
The other org chart
Community banking contains a tension in its name. Banking is regulated, measured and built on systems. Community is relational, local and hard to standardize. Capel's work lives inside that tension. Her civic roles add operating context to a business that asks people to trust it with consequential decisions.
In 2023, Central Illinois Business magazine included Capel in its Forty Under 40 class. The award considered achievement, experience, innovation, leadership and community involvement. Her selection arrived twelve years after her first Busey job, which is long enough to make the recognition feel less like a prediction and more like an audit trail.
Her 2026 remarks about Busey's Bridge Scholarship show how she connects a program to a broader civic argument. “Supporting students as they pursue higher education is one of the most meaningful ways we can invest in the long-term strength of our communities,” she said. The fund awards $50,000 in scholarships annually. Capel's reasoning moved past the check: when students are equipped to succeed, their progress creates lasting change for the places around them.
“When students are equipped to succeed, their progress creates lasting and positive change for the communities we serve.”
Deanna Capel, March 2026What the career teaches
Capel's path offers no single viral tactic. It offers something more durable: a way to widen a job without losing the original discipline. Communications remained relevant when she took on creative. Creative remained relevant when she took on brand. Brand remained relevant when she took on experience. Each layer made the earlier ones more accountable to reality.
The counter, event and community room reveal problems that a presentation can smooth over.
Moving from communications to experience means owning more of what happens after the message.
Associates, customers and communities experience growth differently. Plan for all three.
Institutional memory becomes useful when it improves the next handoff, campaign and transition.
There is also a lesson in staying. Fourteen-plus years at one institution can become repetition, or it can become accumulated context. Capel's progression suggests the second. She has seen the bank as a new graduate, a manager, a creative leader, a brand operator and an executive. That range matters when change arrives, because the person shaping the new experience remembers how earlier promises were made.
The continuity is especially relevant in a business where a customer relationship may outlast a campaign, a technology platform and several job titles. Capel began in Champaign and remained based there while Busey's footprint widened. She carried the same local vocabulary into responsibilities that reached more markets and more teams. The task was no longer simply to tell a clear story about the bank. It was to help many individual interactions add up to one. That is patient work. It asks an executive to notice the handoff between departments, the tone inside a transition and the difference between a community promise announced and one people can actually see.
The clearest picture of her work is not a campaign. It is a loop. Listen closely enough to turn an institution into language. Follow the language until it meets a person. Notice where the experience falls short. Bring that knowledge back inside. Then show up again. In Capel's career, the quiet repetition of that loop is how a communications job became an executive one.