Comms consulting in civil society, business and politics
Communication Creates Perception
Helping organizations navigate the people, institutions, and conversations that shape their work.
Communication matters most when the stakes are high.
For organizations working in business, politics, civil society, or economic and social development, what happens around them can be as important as what happens inside them. Public expectations shift. Political circumstances change. Communities push back. New regulations appear. Partners disagree. Trust can weaken. And decisions that once seemed straightforward suddenly become complicated.
TTB helps organizations make sense of those environments and communicate effectively within them.
We work with civil-society organizations, political groups, businesses, entrepreneurs, and institutions whose success depends on relationships with people beyond their immediate organization. That might mean employees and customers, voters and communities, investors and regulators, partners and critics—or simply people whose lives are affected by what an organization does.
Our role is not simply to help clients say the right thing.
It is to help them understand the conversation they are entering, identify the interests and expectations around them, and develop ways of engaging that can produce something more durable than a good news cycle.
Sometimes that means building support for a new idea. Sometimes it means explaining a difficult decision. Sometimes it means bringing opposing groups into the same conversation. And sometimes it means listening long enough to discover that the original problem was not the one everyone thought they were trying to solve.
We see communication as part of the work itself—not as something added at the end.
Economic development depends on cooperation. Political stability depends, in part, on the ability of institutions and citizens to understand one another. Social progress requires people with different interests to find ways of working together. And environmental and financial sustainability demand decisions whose consequences often extend well beyond the people making them.
In each case, communication is part of the infrastructure.
TTB helps organizations build that infrastructure: the relationships, conversations, and habits of listening that allow them to navigate change, manage disagreement, and work with the people who matter to their future.
Branding and social outreach
Being Seen, Being There
Building a public presence that works both on the screen and in the world beyond it.
Organizations now live in several places at once.
There is the physical world: offices, neighborhoods, meetings, conferences, stores, streets, institutions, and all the ordinary encounters through which people form impressions and relationships. Then there is the digital world, where much of that experience is discussed, challenged, amplified, and sometimes completely reinterpreted.
The two worlds are connected, but they are not the same.
A strong presence in one does not guarantee a strong presence in the other. An organization can have a polished digital identity and still feel distant in real life. It can have excellent relationships on the ground and barely exist in the conversations happening online.
TTB helps organizations navigate both.
We develop strategies that connect digital communication with face-to-face relationships, bringing the two into alignment without pretending that they operate according to the same rules. Social media can introduce an idea; a conversation can give it meaning. A campaign can attract attention; a relationship can determine whether that attention lasts.
That means thinking about more than visibility. It means thinking about reputation, identity, influence, and the everyday experiences through which people decide whether an organization is credible, interesting, useful, or worth listening to.
We also believe that organizations do not exist outside politics.
Businesses, entrepreneurs, universities, cultural institutions, civil-society organizations, and other economic and social actors are affected by public decisions—and, increasingly, they participate in shaping them. Regulation, taxation, labor, education, technology, infrastructure, the environment, and economic policy can all become part of an organization’s public life.
So we help organizations find their place in those conversations.
That does not necessarily mean becoming louder. Sometimes it means becoming clearer. Sometimes it means finding the right people to talk to. And sometimes it means understanding that influence is built less through declarations than through credibility, consistency, and relationships that have been cultivated long before a policy debate begins.
The objective is simple: to help organizations be present where the conversation is happening—and to make that presence mean something.
Social legitimacy
The People Who Still Matter
Helping organizations earn credibility in a world where everyone can publish, but not everyone is believed.
The old media system has changed. The gatekeepers who once decided what reached the public have less control than they used to, while organizations, politicians, companies, and individuals can now speak directly to millions of people.
Disintermediation has made communication faster and, in some ways, more democratic.
It has not made legitimacy unnecessary.
People still look for someone—or somewhere—they trust to make sense of what is happening. Journalists, editors, analysts, community leaders, experts, institutions, creators, and other intermediaries continue to shape how information is understood, even as the old boundaries between media and audience have become harder to see.
For organizations, this creates a strange new problem. Being able to speak directly to people does not necessarily mean being heard. And being heard does not necessarily mean being believed.
TTB helps organizations navigate that space.
We work with social, economic, and political actors to rethink how they communicate: what they say, who says it, where it appears, and what kind of relationship exists between the organization and the people receiving the message.
The work is ongoing because credibility is ongoing.
A single interview, campaign, press release, or viral post can create attention. It rarely creates legitimacy on its own. That comes from repetition, consistency, transparency, and the accumulated experience of encountering an organization over time.
Sometimes the answer is a better message. Sometimes it is a different messenger. Sometimes it is a different conversation altogether.
Our job is to help organizations understand the difference.
In a world where everyone has a platform, legitimacy depends less on having a voice than on giving people a reason to listen.
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