Launching Quiet Campaigns in Authoritarian Times

Client Type: Foundations and philanthropic organizations advancing the protection of communities and vital services against federal attacks and an unpredictable media cycle.
Industry Relevance: The philanthropic sector working to advance equity and justice across a wide range of issue areas (e.g., community safety, education, climate, health equity, housing, income inequality, racial justice, LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, etc.).

The Wakeman Agency helps mission-driven causes and socially responsible companies leverage the power of strategic communications to fight for a better future.

The Scenario

After the initial shock of the government’s authoritarian turn in the United States, many foundations and philanthropic organizations have been faced with the basic question: Should we communicate publicly about our ongoing work for increased equity or should we cease our external communications and keep our heads down? Every organization has had to address this question in some form or another. Sector research shows that many are making the choice to change the language they use, despite other indicators that a growing majority of audience categories support businesses taking a public stand on political issues, including diversity, equity and inclusion, climate change, race, LGBTQ+ issues and reproductive rights, among others. So, let’s say your organization decides it is willing to take on some risk. Perhaps the goal is to offset or address risk being experienced by grantee partners, or because leadership feels they must say or do something to avoid obeying in advance. How might you strategically plan communications next steps to reduce your chance of being targeted?

The Solution: A Quiet Campaign

One valuable option available to foundations and philanthropic organizations in the current climate is what we call a “quiet campaign,” developed and executed through a strategic communications plan, tailored to a specific organizational and sector context. Originated by our strategy team, a quiet campaign reorients many of the tools of traditional public relations campaigns to be executed through a series of back channels, private meetings, invite-only executive roundtable events and low-profile engagement with sector allies. The quiet campaign takes the power of strategic narrative and applies it to interpersonal messaging and small group communications, with the objective of building networks and coalitions to advance key goals of an organization or sector.

One of our clients—a foundation in the top two percent by endowment in the nation—engaged our agency shortly after the inauguration to provide guidance on how to strategically roll out new messaging. Their original goal was to communicate a refreshed version of their current communications to gain greater audience awareness, but they were quickly sidetracked by the question of whether to speak out or pull back messaging.

Through our collaborative discovery process, we reviewed their existing messaging and positioning within their sector as well as among their peer organizations, identified the risk appetite of board and executive leadership, and assessed the strength of relationships and trust among grantee partners and peers. Our findings led us to recommend the quiet campaign approach.

The resulting communications plan included:

For use of alternative language, we provided strategic guidance to help organizational leaders understand the new communications environment more fully. What was once considered effective networking in conversation with more conservative organizations could now transform into scenarios where speaking candidly to all audiences with the same language may bring a substantially higher level of risk. That risk could even undermine the capacity of the foundation to continue to support grantees.

Reception & Impact

From the beginning, all key actors at the foundation were in agreement about their unwavering commitment to support their grantees and continue their work. This has been baked into their foundation’s identity for some time and they were not about to dial that back. Furthermore, grantees and peers within the field had shared in the discovery phase that previous to the current context, they wanted more foundation peers to understand the value of the equity-based approach taken by our client.

Therefore, this shift to a quiet campaign required a reorientation in the way many staff and other parties thought about communicating on behalf of the foundation. The greatest pushback, or challenges, that emerged in the initial stages of the campaign were related to this shift in mindset. Specifically, that moving away from the assurance that speaking loudly about justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion creates space for those values, welcoming more audience members, toward a recognition that this behavior could now draw punitive action from government or sector peers, committed to regressive philanthropic work.

This was a major shift in thinking and the client’s communications team relied on our partnership and expert read of the fluctuating social change and communications sectors to convincingly garner agreement among decision makers about the nature of the current authoritarian environment, and just how quickly things have deteriorated.

Outcomes

The quiet campaign we implemented with our client has so far been a success. It allowed the organization to trace a careful path between the extremes of removing essential language from their website and making flashy public statements that may feel defiant in the face of authoritarians, but are, in actuality, more dangerous than they are useful as communications tools in today’s landscape. Although many of the results that emerge from quiet campaigns are relationship- based and therefore tricky to quantify, a few concrete outcomes from this specific engagement have included:

Beyond Quiet Campaigns

Communications plans can also take other forms, in situations when taking the quiet route is not the most strategic. Other components that appear in communications plans, outside of the context of a quiet campaign, can include:

During this time of political and social change, foundations must consider what rules of the game have changed, and how to continue to advance much-needed progress even in this new context. A quiet campaign can be an effective tool to achieve these goals for foundations.

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