Approach
AFSCME, AFT, NEA, and SEIU came to us with a challenge: pressure 18 Republican lawmakers to vote “no” on Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” – a bill that gutted Medicaid and public education funding. Voters in these districts were already being pummeled with ads about the bill. We knew from past election cycles that there was a high risk they’d tune out more of the same. We needed a way to make the stakes feel real, urgent, and close to home. And we needed to move fast enough to influence the debate before the vote.
Together, we launched Put Families First, a $2 million storytelling and mobilization effort to protect vital services from budget cuts. We built the entire campaign around one principle: let people talk about their lives, without a lot of production or fluff getting in the way. We then launched a surround sound storytelling machine designed to push lawmakers, motivate supporters, and persuade voters on the fence about this bill.
In keeping with the ethos of focusing on individuals and their stories, we kept the brand aesthetic simple. Clean templates, straightforward language, and unfussy production value. We knew the details of peoples’ lived experience were the most persuasive assets we had – and we want that to remain the focal point. (The data backs us up on this, too: head-to-head testing found that this approach handily outperformed traditional political attack ads!) Dynamic creative optimization let us extend that honesty into hyper-local storytelling, allowing us to produce more than 2,000 variants tailored to specific states, districts, and lawmakers.
We supplemented these stories with influencer voices from affected communities, policy experts, and professionals whose credibility with their own audiences carried the message farther than traditional media could reach.
