Xenophon Strategies

General Services Administration

One GSA, One Voice

Increasing brand awareness for an innovative agency.

Project Highlights

• Strategic counsel
• Brand awareness
• Media research/evaluation
• Media materials and messaging development

Overview

The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) hired Xenophon Strategies to help increase awareness among the taxpaying public of its mission and programs, ranging from sustainable building design to historic lighthouses. The objective was to assist GSA in meeting its organizational objective of unifying the agency’s message to better serve its federal, state and local government customers by supporting its agency-wide initiative, “One GSA, One Voice.”

Background

GSA’s media coverage in local media markets has increased 15 percent.

Our work for GSA started in September 2007 with a significant research component. We analyzed the previous six months of media coverage to evaluate where and how GSA was being covered in the media. This analysis uncovered significant, yet untapped, opportunities in local media markets, which led to the second phase of the research project. Xenophon worked with the Central Office’s Public Affairs Division to interview all 11 Regional Public Affairs Officers (PAOs) to gather information about their range of responsibilities, the amount of time available for proactive media relations pitching and to better understand what was needed to make better use of that time. The most significant finding of this research was a near-unanimous request for collateral materials from the Central Office conveying the key messages on GSA’s services to help them deliver a unified message. This and other key findings formed the basis of a written communications strategy that was presented to key agency personnel, and contained two significant programs that Xenophon is currently executing.

Tactics

First, Xenophon set about to develop key messages and a summary fact sheet about the agency. Few GSA employees were able to articulate what the agency does in the same way. In doing so, Xenophon interviewed a number of senior leaders at GSA who identified a desired change in its overall public perception and wanted to raise awareness of GSA’s efforts to help federal, state and local governments become more environmentally friendly. Xenophon developed a broad communications strategy to unify all of GSA’s green initiatives into a single brand, which enabled all agency personnel to speak with one message on an overarching initiative. Xenophon developed the brand identify, logo and messages and then tested them with customers prior to creating a set of collateral materials and assisting GSA in rolling out the brand to all of its employees. Xenophon also supported GSA by communicating the brand to critical external audiences, including customers, media and other third-parties.

The second significant aspect of our work for GSA was developing a series of communications toolkits to help the Regional PAOs spend more time pitching feature story ideas to local media markets. We worked with key personnel to identify a series of topics for which to create toolkits, by bringing together existing information and filling in gaps by creating new materials to provide a turn-key collection of information. This includes items such as feature story pitch concepts to assist Regional Public Affairs Officers pitch local media markets in their respective regions. Xenophon researched, organized and wrote all the pertinent information for each topic and compiled all the information in one binder and on a CD-Rom. The topics ranged from sustainable building design to surplus property sales and GSA’s telework initiative. Each toolkit contained key messages, difficult to answer questions and answers, press release templates, speech text, bylined articles, feature pitch concepts and drafts scripts, fact sheets, relevant photographs and graphics, whitepapers and brochures.

More than half of the regions used the first toolkit within the first month of receiving it. As the second toolkit was delivered, GSA’s media coverage in local media markets had increased 15 percent. Subsequently, the PAOs spent less time preparing their media pitches and more time actually pitching the media. Additionally, the central office found a variety of additional uses for the toolkits, ranging from preparing to deliver testimony on Capitol Hill to communicating with customers.