Renewable Resource Solutions

“Fifth Estate did an exceptional job building my website. They took the time to truly listen to what I wanted and transformed my ideas into personalized content that reflects my business perfectly. Fifth Estate also worked thoughtfully within my budget without ever compromising on quality. The entire process felt easy, collaborative, and tailored to my needs. I couldn’t be happier with the final result and highly recommend Fifth Estate to anyone looking for a website that genuinely represents their vision.” — Kari Divine, Project Manager/Owner

Memphis Urban Wood

“Fifth Estate is masterful at writing precise, efficient, and accurate content for a wide range of communication tools, including websites. On several occasions they have taken our drafts and elevated the clarity and messaging to a new level.” — Jennifer Judd, Chief Operating Officer, Unified Wood Economy

Peninsula Title Agency

“We enjoyed working with Fifth Estate to design our new website. They took the time to think through different ways to accomplish what we wanted and didn’t just go with the easiest option. They were flexible and open to feedback, working through multiple rounds of changes without hesitation. The entire process felt collaborative, and his pricing was very competitive for the quality of work delivered. Highly recommend!” — Mike Divien, Owner and President

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It’s every Houstonian’s worst nightmare! Tonight — Our reporter shows you: What to do if your car drives into a bayou!

It’s every Houstonian’s worst nightmare! Tonight — Our reporter shows you: How to survive a dog attack!

Is your bra giving you cancer?! Tonight — Our team investigates.

My wife and I were living in Houston at the time, and we’d watch in smug amusement (we got the Houston Chronicle and New York Times every day) at the barrage of almost incomprehensible pitfalls and tragedies that were lurking if we dared step outside the relatively safe (not counting the potential radon) confines of our apartment.

As surrealistic as it could often be, there was an underlying reality that was actually quite depressing. At the end of each broadcast, there was an almost invisible chyron saying the station was owned by none other than one of the titans of reliable, well-researched, objective, not-trying-to-grab-eyeballs-with-sensational-headlines journalism, the Washington Post Company. Other heavy hitters like the New York Times Company and the Tribune Media Company were also in the game of TV station ownership.

Fast forward 30 years. It seems that every week another news outlet is folding, and findings by the Pew Research Center for just the daily newspaper side of the equation paint a grim picture. From a height in the 1990s, circulation has dropped like hail in a Houston thunderstorm.

As everyone left in the news business ponders, and mightily struggles against, this decline, if the industry is looking for a cause, it could start by looking in the mirror. By funding an interminable ratings race fueled by upping the volume and dumbing down the content, the legacy media moguls who traded dignity for profits taught us, like Pavlov’s dog, that there was no difference between journalism and sensationalism, and that you could get your “news” for free. Sort of like owning a premium health foods market where you make most of your money selling quinoa, and giving away ice cream out the back as a nutritious alternative.

As we see every day — despite the high-quality journalism that still hangs on in all forms — what this means is less accountability from government, less civic engagement from the public, increased polarization and, in the end, a less-informed citizenry. This reality is especially acute in small markets, where state governments and city councils no longer face the scrutiny and accountability good journalism brings.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that my take is the only reason for the sharp downturn. A journalist friend of mine is quick to point out other factors like, as he puts it, “too much profit-taking by the big chains and too little reinvestment in how to deliver good journalism in a post-literate, post-credulous society.” Then there’s the advent of Craig’s List in 1995, which severely undercut classified ad sales, a major source of newspapers’ revenue. And not to think this contagion is confined to serious outlets, tabloids have also struggled to survive in the digital age.

Can anything be done? I’m an optimist, and though I don’t believe there’s a silver bullet out there, organizations like the American Journalism Project and innovative rethinking of business strategies like nonprofit models — DCist a noted exception — show promise.

Whatever the combination of solutions that, hopefully, starts to turn the tide, at the end of the day it comes down to this: Since the Great Depression, through World War II and the turbulent 1960s, Americans have never had to weather tumultuous times like the present without good journalism.  Now’s no time to find out what happens.

Got a question about PR, communications or life in general? E-mail asktheprguy@fifth-estate.com.

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Please help! I keep reading on listservs and social that it’s almost impossible to prove ROI for nonprofit communications. Now my executive director wants to know how we’re doing, and I don’t have a clue what to tell her. 

Signed, Stressing in Silver Spring

Dear Stressing,

First, take a deep breath and relax. The PR Guy is here to help.

Second, forget what you’ve heard in the past, either from the doomsayers and the head-in-the-handers or the well-intentioned but often-misguided consultants in the cottage industry of complicated PR ROI metrics. At the most fundamental level, if you’re having trouble measuring your ROI then you’re measuring the wrong thing.

Take our sibling profession … marketing. While we may scowl at the “Four Ps” and roll our eyes at the day-long packaging summits, you notice that very rarely is anyone asking about ROI. That’s because of what they measure. Back when the PR Guy was the Marketing Guy for a sports and entertainment arena, only one thing mattered: Butts in seats.

So if the Marketing Guy ran a great publicity campaign, with a pile of clips to show for the effort, there was still only one thing the promoter cared about at the end of the night: Did you make me money? If the show made the numbers, the campaign was a success. If it didn’t, the promoter would say something like, “Great. I can use those clips to feed my family until I get to work with a real marketing pro.” (Promoters can be really harsh, if a bit dramatic.)

And while lucre is not generally the end game for nonprofits, something is, and it should be spelled out clearly in the organization’s strategic plan (if it’s not, that’s a whole big other mess that you need to solve first). Which makes ROI easy: If the organization achieved the something—the clear goal laid out in the strategic plan—then the campaign worked. If the goal wasn’t met, the campaign didn’t come through.

Going this route requires a lot of trust. Maybe the goal was unrealistic. Maybe the campaign had a fundamental flaw. Either way, you shouldn’t try to hide behind a mountain of social media engagement, and the boss has to come halfway and own the management challenges. The good news for PR people is that we have the ace in the hole. Trust begins with dialogue, and dialogue is our bread and butter.

Bottom line? When communications plans walk in lockstep with overall strategic plans, the results actually do speak for themselves.

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In response, the District created two innovative programs that work in tandem to promote the development of green solutions to stormwater management – a first-in-the-nation market-based stormwater credit and trading program, and a related initiative that allows property owners greater flexibility for ongoing inspection and maintenance of their stormwater retention facilities. To increase uptake of the programs across the city, the District awarded a grant to the Urban Land Institute, which turned to Fifth Estate to design and activate a communications plan to move audiences to action.

Decisions about stormwater management come at numerous points in the development process, and are made by many and varied professionals along the way – from civil engineers to architects to facilities managers to developers to the private landowners who generate credits. These many audiences each require wholly distinct messaging, and traditional stakeholder outreach attempts had not proven fully effective.

To meet these challenges, Fifth Estate developed a series of micro-targeted communications packages that told the story of the programs from each audience’s unique perspective. Based on that approach, we developed complementary case studies, blog posts, content for professional organization websites, targeted emails, social media posts, and earned media pitches. In addition to promotion through ULI and District of Columbia channels, this array of materials enabled champions from each industry to use the right tool, at the right time, to directly target the right audience.

Read the full case study here.

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After its initial launch, the group turned to Fifth Estate Communications and partner J.J. Hinrichs & Associates to plan and facilitate a two-day strategic planning session, with the two goals of crafting an action plan to guide the coalition’s next steps and creating communication tools for organizations to use with their members. Over the course of interviews with national staff and on-the-ground members and in the planning session itself, Fifth Estate worked to identify common threads, shape messages, and highlight compelling examples of health equity projects in communities across the country. Ultimately, the effort led to a series of vignettes released by JCTA partner organizations demonstrating that change can start with a conversation, and that transformation is possible when partnering across professions.

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Are you and your profession happy that the truth is finally dead?

Signed, Wondering in Northwest

Dear Wondering,

Although these are surely depressing times, the PR Guy takes some solace in believing the truth isn’t dead. It’s just buried.

It used to get buried under an avalanche of accuracy. Back in the days when the more-or-less objective mainstream media had a more-or-less  lock on the news business, PR people would get frustrated with the necessary focus on accuracy that journalists bring to their work. That is to say, we’d often read the very accurate statement that there are those who believe the world is flat. (There’s a whole documentary on it!) The TRUTH, as we PR people like to point out, is that the world is more-or-less spherical, a big ball hanging out in space going around the sun every 365 and 1/4 days.

Back then, it wasn’t uncommon at all for the truth to break through the accuracy and win the day.

Today the truth is buried under an avalanche of information, a huge portion of which is of suspect provenance generated by an amorphous, self-reinforcing Lie Machine. Accuracy can barely poke it’s head out, so the truth struggles to get even the slightest purchase.

The solution? More truth. Fighting the Lie Machine is a fool’s errand. It’s too big, too fluid, and way too capable of co-opting everything that’s thrown at it. Instead, we need to flood the market — in a smart and targeted way — with more truth more often in ways that people can more easily digest.

It’s like they used to say on the X-Files: “The truth is out there.” Our job is to help uncover it.

Got a question? E-mail asktheprguy@fifth-estate.com.

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