The Hatcher Group includes experienced, award-winning journalists. We make personal, strategic and effective connections with reporters, resulting in outstanding media coverage for our clients. We devise strategic media campaigns, maintain directories of reporters, write press releases and media advisories, design media briefing materials, organize press conferences, edit and place op-eds and prepare clients for interviews and editorial board visits.

 

CASE STUDIES

A MULTI-CITY MEDIA STRATEGY FOR SUMMER LEARNING

Students, especially those from low-income families, fall behind academically during the summer. The Hatcher Group has worked with the National Center for Summer Learning at Johns Hopkins University to design a national media outreach strategy to draw attention to the need for more quality summer learning opportunities. The Hatcher Group wrote press releases, aggressively pitched stories, placed op-eds and arranged editorial board visits.

 

Hundreds of newspapers featured the center, including The Washington Post, National Public Radio, the Tavis Smiley Show, the Baltimore Sun, the Chicago Tribune, the San Jose Mercury News, the Miami Herald, the Denver Post, and Education Week.

 

The coverage boosted support for funding for the Summer Term Education Programs for Upward Performance (STEP UP) Act, which Congress passed to create more high-quality summer opportunities for students.

LOCAL, NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL COVERAGE ABOUT WORKING FAMILIES IN AMERICA
The Hatcher Group led an aggressive outreach strategy for the 2008 release of the report, “Still Working Hard, Still Falling Short.” This follows the successful release of the 2004 report by the Working Poor Families Project, “Working Hard, Falling Short.”

The Hatcher Group played an integral role at every step, including writing and editing the report, creating a unique report Web site, preparing a national press release and template press release for local nonprofit groups and hosting a conference call for members of the media.

Both the 2004 and 2008 reports gained significant media attention ranging from a New York Times column by Bob Herbert to a report on ABC Nightly News to stories by the Associated Press and Reuters in 2004. In 2008, more than five dozen national and international media outlets ran an Associated Press story, radio interviews played across the county, and stories ran in major papers nationwide, ranging from the Washington Post to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The wide coverage supported ongoing efforts in state capitals and in Washington, D.C., to strengthen policies affecting low-income working families.