Communications and Campaign Strategy.
We support clients with strategic communications planning, harmonizing goals, audiences, tactics, and capacity needs. We’re especially adept at wielding these skills within the confines of issues campaigns, from the efforts to pass legislation or ballot initiatives, to movements that thwart bad things from happening. We have a natural affinity for grassroots culture, but also a clear-eyed understanding of realpolitik. We integrate into team structures, shepherd the day-to-day needs, and synchronize our client’s voice across all platforms.
CASE STUDY
The Chicago suburb of Hawthorn Woods runs its municipal offices out of a converted barn. This is not a sign of resource deficiency or antiquated infrastructure. It’s a political statement. The village treasures its rural heritage, and as suburban development has proliferated all around it, Hawthorn Woods has planned carefully to salvage the natural landscape – the wetlands, woods, and meadows – that connects it to its past. It’s an aesthetic that sets Hawthorn Woods apart and defines what the village stands for.
When the village needed help taking a stand against a threat to that way of life, it retained Mike Truppa Communications to shape a message, capture headlines, raise consciousness, and win the fight. In 2018, the State of Illinois resurrected a long-moribund proposal to build a new toll road straight through the heart of Hawthorn Woods, barreling through sensitive natural habitat, splitting the community in half, and indelibly degrading the landscape. Hawthorn Woods vowed to fight the proposal and needed support assembling a public campaign.
Mike Truppa Communications surveyed the political and media landscape and developed a comprehensive plan to help the Village give voice to its opposition, identify all available venues – through the media, the regulatory system, local politics, and community networks – to communicate it, and control the terms of the public debate. We turned the state’s public meetings on the proposal into a forum to showcase grassroots dissent. We parlayed that dissent into news coverage and swayed editorial boards to embrace our position. That media attention, itself, became an mechanism to educate and organizing the broader public, expanding the bloc of opposition to the project. A virtuous cycle ensued, and within a year, the state pulled the plug on the road proposal, conceding that there wasn’t sufficient public support to justify studying it any further.
Media Relations.
We serve as strategists and media liaisons for clients aspiring to make news. We formulate the larger strategic blueprint and draft the fine print of the news release and the op-ed.. We have the savvy to know when to offer a reporter an exclusive, when to stage a major news conference, and when to remain discreet.
CASE STUDY
Five days before Christmas, BPI Chicago called with news only slightly less seminal than a Santa Claus sighting: After more than 50 years, it was on the brink of settling the Gautreaux case, a landmark lawsuit that had changed the landscape of public housing across the country.
The lawsuit, which had successfully dismantled Chicago’s racially discriminatory public housing policies, demonstrating how they perpetuated the poverty and segregation of the city’s black residents, had finally, after a half century, achieved enough cultural reform that it would no longer require constant oversight from a federal judge.
When BPI Chicago contacted us, it had less than 36 hours before the announcement of the settlement would go public. Within those two days, we swooped in and devised the media strategy for conducting the announcement; compiled the news release, FAQ’s, and other background for the media; developed internal talking points and prepared messengers for media questions; coordinated counterparts at the city agency managing public housing; and generated front-page coverage in the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, stories in all local electronic and digital media, a segment on the city’s premiere public affairs talk shows; and two favorable editorials – all before Santa Claus arrived.
Copywriting and Publications.
We offer copywriting and design of brochures, reports, website content and other collateral materials.
CASE STUDY
How you condense 50 years of history at the forefront of the nation’s civil rights movement into 10 pages – with artwork? That was the question we had to address when the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights asked us to produce a centerpiece brochure on its 50th anniversary to accompany its gala fundraiser.
We interviewed the organization’s principals, combed through its archives for to cull out they key milestones in its history and collect photos and artwork, drafted the narrative for the brochure and oversaw design and production.
Advertising Copy.
We develop advertising content for all media, tailoring messages to audiences based on market research, and fashioning creative concepts that represent those narratives with finesse.
CASE STUDY
When the Citizens Utility Board needed to hold the Trump administration accountable for an energy policy that would saddle Illinois consumers with higher electricity bills and more air pollution, it raised the money for a robust radio ad campaign on Chicago’s leading all-news station.
Under urgent time constraints, we produced a crisp 60-second script in less than 90 minutes than ultimately won approval from CUB’s broad coalition of partners who needed to sign off on the ad.