Strategic Message Development

Here are examples of our message development work.

National Professional Association: Maintaining Business in a Product Line

Rebecca Leet developed a message to help a 90,000-member professional association sustain sales in a threatened product line – accreditation of programs.  The organization was revising its accreditation process over 18 months and needed to keep current customers in the pipeline rather than have them opt-out for that time period.  The association says the message was a key factor in its achieving a retention rate exceeding 90% -- far beyond their goal of 75%.

Think Tank: Advancing a New Social Policy

Rebecca Leet designed a series of messages for The Center for the Study of Social Policy (CSSP) to advance national adoption of a radical new approach to preventing child abuse and neglect. The messages helped CSSP overcome major obstacles to its success: the approach was a drastic change and complex to explain, and CSSP had no means of implementing it. Yet, within 3 years of the first message, half of U.S. states had begun to implement it and the federal government had become a major supporter of the new approach. Within 6 years, the approach was the most widely recognized prevention approach in the country, having twice the recognition of any other approach, according to a RAND survey of 2,300 child abuse professionals. CSSP says the strategic messages Rebecca Leet & Associates developed were a significant factor in its extraordinary and rapid success.

Corporation: Internal Marketing of Time-Saving Tool

Rebecca Leet created a message to help a global consulting firm's knowledge management unit increase support for the KM system at the senior partner level and help increase its use by the firm's professionals.   The message was so useful that it was still being used five years later.  Moreover, it helped the KM unit better understand its own internal operations and set its annual operating goals.

Non-profit Organization: Orienting the Public to a New Concept

Rebecca Leet was engaged after the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation (JDF) had radically restructured its research program in a highly innovative way in order to accelerate the rate of breakthroughs on Type 1 diabetes. It needed messaging help because no one except a few scientists understood the change well enough to explain it to Board members, funders, the news media, and others. It needed consistent and persuasive language that all staff could use to "sell" the dramatic new approach. In a series of three meetings with a Board-staff task force, we helped the organization identify the most important target markets for its message and create a 30-word message that explained what it had done, and why, and how its action would result in faster research progress. We then helped them develop messages for each audience and a tool to train affiliates in the use of the core and subset messages. Subsequently, we were engaged to work with their scientists to create brief, understandable, descriptive messages -- for use with non-scientific audiences -- of the key discoveries being sought.