Case Study

CLIENT: Veterans Cannabis Project

TACTICS: Legislative Support Services, Media Relations

STRATEGY: Highlighted the importance of medical cannabis to reduce effects of a multitude of symptoms being experienced by veterans

OUTCOMES: 25 media placements, halting of legislative emails servers for 8 hours due to public response

A bipartisan bill on medical cannabis was up for a vote in January 2020 and the Veterans Cannabis Project (VCP) knew that this bill was integral to further treatment for veterans in the Commonwealth. VCP hired our team to garner media awareness about the bill and help activate the community to reach out to their legislators to support the bill. The result far exceeded our objective – in fact so many people emailed their legislators that the email servers crashed from the outreach on medical cannabis alone, which ultimately led to the passage of the bill.

With a Goal of garnering media awareness of integral medical cannabis legislation to help veterans, our Objective was to increase local news mentions of VCP’s lobby day to a total of five placements over the course of one week. We leveraged the Strategy of highlighting the importance of medical cannabis to reduce effects of a multitude of symptoms. Our targeted Audience were regional and local media outlets, local community, and legislators.

Our firm worked with the VCP team to plan a media day to share information on how this bill would impact veterans. We created media advisories, press releases and pitches for the event, with a focus on engaging the community to contact their legislators. We arranged interviews, pitched individual outlets and fostered personal connections with editors and reporters. Our individualized media pitches helped generate excitement and positive sentiment.

We far exceeded our objective securing more than 25 individual media placements. Every story we pitched received media coverage.

We also evaluated our efforts by the response from the community. Due to media awareness VCP garnered 15,000 Virginians signing a letter to the Governor and over 25,000 emails – halting the legislative email servers for eight hours.