Milo Public Affairs LLC helps clients achieve their communication and policy goals.
Our work is guided by experience with successful policy campaigns, candidates and elected officials and informed by research in political science, semiotics and communication theory.
Success depends on knowing:- What victory looks like in the short, medium and long terms.
- Who is in charge of the change, who the critical decision makers are at every step of the process.
- What those decision makers find persuasive, and from whom.
- How to build and run the campaign to bring the right messages, from the right messengers, to the right decision makers at the right time.
- Facilitate strategic planning sessions, guiding conversations and helping groups come to a shared vision of victory and the steps needed to get there.
- Draft, review and edit strategic plans that account for internal and external strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and obstacles.
- Assemble and manage the team to implement the plan.
- Serve as an experienced member of a larger team committed to success.
- Directly communicate with policy makers and others who create the change.
- The most important person is the decision maker – not those who already agree with the position but are not in a position to act.
- It is much easier to persuade someone of something they already believe than it is to get them to believe something new. As such the most successful campaigns align organizational goals with what the decision maker already believes rather than making the decision maker go to the organization.
- What an issue is "about" is critical to which policy makers are involved, the possible policy outcomes, and which arguments will have the most effect.
- The best campaigns are coordinated, bringing together direct communication with decision makers, engaging activists, using online and offline media in the most efficient ways possible to create change.
- Language and stories matter. For thousands of years scholars from Aristotle to Locke to Nietzsche to Edelman and beyond have recognized that ours is a world made of words, and that the words we use determine how we act in the world. We are also story tellers, and tend to view both politics and policy through pre-existing understandings of how the world works – and how it ought to work. Our stories have heroes and villains, victors and vanquished. Political facts do not exist apart from the words used to explain them, and those explanations become parts of larger, already existing, understandings of the world. The best campaigns put issues into contexts and provide the explanations that will resonate with decision makers.