Our Work
These are not case studies. They are specific things that happened — problems that needed reframing, debates that needed changing, results that followed.
The CTE Science Alliance
Our current work is the purest expression of everything on this page — self-initiated, built from scratch, and already changing how industries, educators, and policymakers talk about career and technical education in America. It is also an open invitation: if your organization faces a perception problem that conventional communications has failed to solve, this is what a different approach looks like.
When the data changes the debate: American Beverage Institute
Drunk driving is an emotional issue — and that emotion can make bad policy feel like good policy. Our work for ABI was never about defending drinking. It was about insisting that policy meant to save lives should actually save lives.
When the debate shifted to sobriety checkpoints, Megan found NHTSA data buried in a government database: roving patrols catch three times as many impaired drivers as roadblocks. When federal lawmakers pushed to lower the BAC limit to 0.08, we asked a different question: what was the average BAC of an actual drunk driver? 0.16 — double the proposed limit.
In both cases, the government's own research told a story nobody was telling. We told it.
The classrooms that make news: The Jump$tart Coalition Teen Teach-In
Personal finance education is easy to ignore. We made it impossible. Working with Jump$tart, we helped design a program where high school students create lesson plans and then walk into elementary classrooms and teach them. Then we made sure local television was watching. The coverage has been extraordinary — and it proved a principle we'd been applying for decades: the most powerful communications don't tell people what to think. They create a moment that makes the conclusion unavoidable.
Targeting the right market, not the biggest one: A prominent traffic safety coalition
Repeat and egregious speeders — street racers, chronic offenders — keep driving after their licenses are suspended. Fines don't stop them. Intelligent Speed Assistance devices can. Our charge was to build the earned media case for state legislation requiring ISA technology for these offenders. We placed op-eds by victims and legislators in local papers, and held technology demonstrations with an ISA-equipped vehicle at statehouses in Maryland, Arizona, and Wisconsin — putting lawmakers and media in the same room as the solution. Sometimes the most valuable coverage doesn't run in a national outlet. It runs in a state capital newspaper on the morning a committee votes. Last year, ISA legislation was passed and signed into law by the governors of both Virginia and Washington state. The campaign is working.
Turning a pandemic into a platform: A leading trade association
When COVID shut down the country, the chemical industry faced an existential perception problem. We turned the crisis into an opportunity — documenting in real time how chemicals were essential to N95 masks, hand sanitizers, and the public health infrastructure keeping people alive. Blog posts, Q&As, and industry documents were picked up by trade press and elevated the trade association as a thought leader at exactly the moment the industry needed to be seen differently.
Building a Coalition from Crisis: Retirement Security Coalition
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis — when savings had been wiped out, home values had collapsed, and millions of Americans were facing retirement with nothing — Financial Services Roundtable CEO Steve Bartlett charged us with doing something about it. We created the Retirement Security Coalition from scratch: financial services executives, nonprofits, consumer advocates, and policy organizations brought together under a single campaign — Save. Protect. Grow. — with former U.S. Treasurer Anna Cabral as chairman. Over three years we ran executive roundtables with media, policy convenings that built relationships across traditionally separate sectors, and public education efforts that put retirement security on the agenda. It was also where we first met Laura Levine, CEO of the Jump$tart Coalition — a relationship that would matter years later.