Community Strategies

Founded in 2004, Community Strategies is an independently owned public affairs consultancy with offices in the Washington Metropolitan area. Clients include corporations, governments, industry associations and nonprofit organizations. Community Strategies is a recognized leader in leveraging the online medium, helping clients shape their reputation and influence issue environments nationally. Community Strategies provides strategic counsel and implementation support for a variety of businesses by helping them optimize their high-impact, advocacy campaigns.

Community Strategies broad network of local organizers across the country helps to raise the profile of our clients campaigns through an innovative approach of public education and advocacy.

Community Strategies will help you engage internal stakeholders and advocates on a personal level and generate compelling communications that show decision-makers the true impact of your issues.

By utilizing innovative online tactics, Community Strategies experts create the ideal mix of media channels to find your market, deliver your message and generate response, at the best possible return on investment.

At Community Strategies, we offer our clients a specialized, integrated service that gets results for you! Our approach begins with an analysis of the situation, followed by the creation of a tailored program with focused objectives to maximize the effectiveness of the campaign. We work closely with our clients and continually evaluate and refine our recommendations to ensure all programs are on target and within budget. We offer a specialized, integrated service from experienced political operatives that gets results in Washington, D.C. and nationwide.

With the flood of mass communications bombarding Legislators everyday, it is critical to find fresh, new ways to get your message across. Our unique approach combines traditional grassroots tactics with innovative online advocacy and high-tech outreach communications services listed below.

Alexandria, VA (October 17, 2006) - Community Strategies, Inc., provider of full-service strategic consultation, implementation services, and technology products for stakeholder identification and mobilization, responded to the rising demand for campaign-style grassroots operations by reorganizing its corporate structure to accommodate the needs of organizations nationwide. The three year old public affairs consulting firm who has specialized in serving Fortune 500 companies, leading trade associations and local community groups to leverage their advocacy efforts, made the announcement today.. read more

An army of well-financed grass-roots organizations is operating in 32 states to build public support for President Bush's Social Security investment accounts plan, after a slow start earlier this year.

At the heart of this stepped-up drive is a team of state field coordinators who turn out supporters, from senior citizens to union members, for town-hall meetings where Mr. Bush and other Republican officials promote the proposal. "This effort is generating surprising support for the general Thrust of Bush's plan in nontraditional Republican constituencies," said Dirk Van Dongen, president of the National Association of Wholesalers, a key adviser to the administration's lobbying drive.. read more

False advertising in the free market rarely pays. In fact, it can cause a business to incur serious losses or go bankrupt. This is because customers who are told that their hotdog is made of 100% beef and then discover that it is really made of soybeans once they bite into it will not likely repeat their mistake. Moreover, every time such customers hear or read one of the ads by the fraudulent hotdog salesman they will be reminded that they were swindled. They will be motivated to tell their friends and neighbors about it, and the swindler will then receive his just financial desserts. He will not have many repeat customers, the lifeblood of any successful business.

This is one way in which the free market penalizes fraud and encourages truth in advertising. In addition, economic research shows that it is the companies with the most successful products that tend to advertise the most intensely, not the companies with marginal or lousy products. In business, liars understand that at best, they might get away with it only once.

But this is not true of government advertising since there is no free market feedback mechanism in operation. Politicians understand that voters (their "customers") tend to only remember what they have said and done over the past couple of months, at most. They are "rationally ignorant" of most everything else. Consequently, politicians know that they can lie through their teeth over and over, as long as they cool it around election time, when their opponents have every incentive to point out all their lies and broadcast them to the public.

In addition, the government has such a loud "voice" that whenever it wants to, it can drown out all other voices. Every government bureaucrat is a relentless propagandist for his agency or department; and the government-run school system has long been designed to indoctrinate the population in the myth of the benevolent state and the "imperfect" and "failing" free market. The entire state university system in America is one giant "think tank" for the promotion of statism. In short, lying pays in politics much more than it does in business. It is not just a funny joke to say of a politician, "if his lips are moving, he's lying"; it's generally true most of the time.

GRO-Grass Roots Organizing, is a community based, nonprofit organization incorporated Friday, the 13th of October, 2000, in the State of Missouri. Our consumer-driven group with dues paying members (about 75 - 80 % low income) and additional allies was organized to give tools and leadership opportunities for our families living in poverty conditions to:

Reform the way the status quo and powers- that- be conduct business;

Establish a powerful civic force and clear agenda around Health Care, Temporary Assistance, Food Stamps, Utilities, Housing Reforms that impact decisions at the local, state and national levels;

Amplify voices and have a collective presence within our communities; and

Let REAL poverty experts [those directly impacted by social-economic policies, laws, unfair practices who live in poverty] take their rightful place at the table to offer REAL solutions.

GRO-Grass Roots Organizing is membership-driven. GRO Leaders identify and work on issues that affect them as well as determine the direction and focus of our work. We have clearly defined outcomes for our efforts.

If you would like to become a GRO member, please click on the "Become a Member" link. Individually we are one single voice....Together, we are one extremely powerful organized movement. Let your voice be heard! Become a GRO member!

If you would like to contribute to GRO - Grass Roots Organizing in other ways, please contact us at info@gromo.org

Let's face it. You're not Procter & Gamble or Volkswagen, so when it comes to marketing to your customers, you're more likely to get a little creative than to grab your checkbook and sign on with some hot New York agency. That's what these business owners have done in Inc.com's Guide to Grassroots Marketing. From counter help that sing and dance to engineers that produce comic strips, each of these businesses found effective ways to spread the word about their businesses and to retain their customers without spending a fortune.

Political consulting is the business which has grown up around advising and assisting political campaigns, primarily in the United States. As democracy has spread around the world, American political consultants have often developed an international base of clients. Though its most important role is probably in the production of mass media (largely television), political consultants advise campaigns on virtually all of their activities, from research to field strategy.

At its essence successful public relations is all about story telling -- and every campaign or non-profit, no matter who they may be, has a great story to tell. It may take a while to identify and massage your campaign's story and it may also take some practice to refine delivering the messages and preparing for questions, but once you've settled on the dimensions of your story and who is best equipped to tell it, then it becomes very important to determine which audiences and supporters you need to influence ­who needs to hear and understand your story.

Of course, the media is an audience in and of itself, but more importantly it is a pipeline to your key supporters ­ a conduit that also needs to understand your message. Every organization needs to communicate and develop a dialogue with its supporters. If you are a regional or national organization an excellent way to efficiently reach these constituencies is through regular media tours -- which are simply a set of pre-arranged face-to-face meetings where reporters, editors, editorial writers and producers from news organizations can interview your spokesperson and write about it. Media tours usually cover multiple media markets in cities and can last for a few days or in some cases much longer.

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• Influencing Congress & Other Decision-Makers

The Google/YouTube partnership means the revolution won't be broadcast, but will be shown on Internet TV, which has replaced broadcast media for the get-what-we-want-when-we-want-it generation, and, at least for now, it's free. But what does watching Bob in Omaha's karaoke performance of an Eminem song have to do with the future of politics? If posting Internet videos is free, if any candidate can create and share a 30-second ad or documentary at virtually no cost, this could well mark the end of broadcast media's rule and mean the end of egregious campaign spending, no laws necessary. Certainly, the shift to Internet TV won't drive all money from politics. Wealthy candidates will still pay for slicker videos, hire more sycophantic consultants to tell them what to say, and replace volunteer callers and petition carriers with paid staff. But the gulf between needing to raise $3 million to run for the U.S. Senate now versus, say, one-sixth of that amount in a YouTube world, is the difference between only a handful of elite candidates being able to run for Congress and win -- and the rest of us getting more equal access to political power. The cornerstone of the Connected Age is a shift in power from institutions to individuals. The ability to communicate one to many now rests in the hands of people effectively using social media tools such as YouTube, MySpace and FaceBook. Assembly member Patty Berg, D-Eureka, claims to be running California's first major paperless, all-Internet campaign race. Our civic life is blossoming into realms far beyond voting, as Connected Age groups such as The Sunlight Foundation (www.sunlightfoundation.com) make access to databases with information about where and how money fuels Congress as easy as pushing a button. Just as we have removed the middlemen from sales of our memorabilia and the purchase of books, so too, now, can we now find candidates with a message, vision and appeal that suits us, when and how we want to watch and listen to them. The biggest threats to this new, more level political playing field are the same kind of monied interests that control unequal access to health care and artificially inflated phone access charges.