Involving others is in Cronin’s DNA

WORLD BUILDING: Maureen Cronin, Worldways Social Marketing CEO and co-founder, works with her husband, company President Mark Marosits. / PBN PHOTO/KATE WHITNEY LUCEY
WORLD BUILDING: Maureen Cronin, Worldways Social Marketing CEO and co-founder, works with her husband, company President Mark Marosits. / PBN PHOTO/KATE WHITNEY LUCEY

As a top executive at a social-benefit corporation, Maureen Cronin gets hired to solve problems and create change.

She takes on that role as co-founder and CEO through her firm, Worldways Social Marketing in Newport, partnering with her husband, company co-founder and President Mark Marosits.

Founded in 1996, Worldways provides marketing and Web-development services to a variety of nonprofits. The company has completed more than 1,000 social-marketing engagements in areas including health-behavior change, the environment and fair trade.

Social marketing is about creating social change by “using theoretical models that actually work,” Cronin said.

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Cronin, 60, sees her strongest skill as that of problem-solver, and it’s one that emerged early in her career.

Employer Joe Vacchio of Hart, Schaffer & Marx of Chicago chose Cronin, at the time a young, single mother, to work with him in the fashion industry in Boston. She later helped open a store in her hometown of Manchester, N.H.

As a young woman Cronin had studied marketing and became certified in health care administration. From 1994 on she also studied anthropology at the Metropolitan College of Denver, making the connection between marketing and social and cultural norms.

In 1983, at age 28, she took a communications job at a hospital in Manchester, a move that led to a lengthy career in health care.

She relocated to Denver in 1994 to become marketing director for a Colorado-based health care system.

Yet as good as she was at this type of work, the impersonal nature of larger health care systems didn’t appeal to her. By the end of 1996, she founded Worldways Social Marketing.

The company became an official social-benefit corporation in Rhode Island in 2015, five years after the couple dissolved the Denver office and moved to Newport.

An early accomplishment came from helping develop a national model for emergency-preparedness communication after Sept. 11 by working with the Santa Clara County, Calif., health and hospital system. The model was adopted as a best practice by the National Association of City and County Health Officials, she said.

The company has 15 active projects.

Her goals? “Continue doing what we’re doing now,” she said: “Be accessible [and] involved.” •

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