Challenge
After almost one year of development, the Mayor’s Commission on Public Education needed to announce the findings and recommendations of its report on the state of public education in Pittsburgh’s public school system. The topic of reform is highly volatile, since different interest groups have vastly differing perspectives. Given the city’s financial crisis and its attribution of these problems to the Mayor, the Commission needed to be sensitive to these issues.

Communication tactics and messages would need to be highly targeted to the information needs and agendas of each stakeholder group and timed properly for optimum exposure and reception. The process would need to allow for a two-way dialogue that genuinely engages the public to build a sense of optimism for the future of education in the Pittsburgh area.

Implementation
D+CO first identified a hierarchy of key stakeholders influential to the outcome of this announcement and built a matrix for how Commission members would reach the key audiences.

The message strategy for each stakeholder group was crafted, along with overall FAQs and a script that reinforced the one central issue as the unifying factor among all disparate stakeholders: the future of our children in this region.

All members of the 37-member Commission were briefed on the collective messages and several members were media trained. D+CO prepared press kit materials, scripts, remarks and presentations for message delivery prior to, during the press briefing and for post-announcement media contact.

D+CO planned the strategy for all media contact, including the agenda and speakers for the press briefing to announce the report and all subsequent media contact, including scheduling of interviews, conducting editorial board briefings, coordinating opinion-editorials for publication and arranging in-studio interviews.

To manage the public dialogue process, D+CO refined overall messages to reflect post-announcement responses and to move the message ‘forward’ to the next level of implementation: the creation of a Citizen’s Alliance watchdog organization, as recommended in the Commission’s findings.

Results
The objectives of the public announcement of the report were to create public awareness and dialogue about the state of public education in Pittsburgh and to minimize negativity among key constituencies. These objectives were achieved successfully.

The announcement of the report became one of the biggest stories in the region in 2003.

In six weeks, coverage of the report generated more than 43 million impressions, with more than 50 percent of coverage characterized as positive toward the report’s recommendations, including an endorsement of the report by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s editorial board, which appeared during the height of the public discussion about the report.

Continued media coverage of the report has positioned its recommendations as the definitive starting point for dramatic education reform in Pittsburgh, overshadowing detractors’ assertions.