The Problem

In major election years when the top of the ticket dominates media coverage, how do we drive attention for down-ballot issues? And how do we sustain that coverage during the “off years” when election coverage has simmered down—but ballot measure campaigns are still happening across the country? These were the obstacles the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center was grappling with when they engaged with New Heights Communications.

The Strategy

We worked to highlight how citizen-driven initiatives are a successful tool used by voters for decades to bypass unresponsive government and legislate directly on the issues they care about—particularly in battleground states that we knew election coverage would focus on. By tying these local measures to the national electoral and legal conversations, we were able to demonstrate the interconnectedness: After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, we saw six ballot measures addressing abortion that cycle and eleven more in 2024. And now, with fears of a potential rollback of same-sex marriage rights by a conservative Supreme Court, we again used this framework, to highlight the growing trends of marriage equality ballot measures. These were reactionary trend stories to catapult ballot measures into the national conversation.

And since the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center is the leading organization focused on progressive ballot measures nationwide, this allowed us to position their executive director, Chris Melody Fields Figueredo as the go-to source on this topic.

The Results

Our model was met with tons of success. We were able to position Chris as the expert on ballot measures—just check out one of our monthly media roundups from September or November. She was featured in NBC News, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Axios, HuffPost, POLITICO, AP, Democracy Now, and so many more! She was also featured on podcasts like NPR 1A, The Daily Beans, Future Hindsight, Sorry Not Sorry with Alyssa Milano, and The Electorette.

And we are keeping the conversation going long after the election: Twice monthly, we share status updates on implementation of successful ballot initiatives—and flag the many legal or legislative challenges—with pickup in NBC News, PBS News, and AP. We host regular (and widely-attended!) press conferences on efforts to undermine direct democracy getting Chris quoted in HuffPost, PBS News, and Tampa Bay Times. And we use the calendar to our advantage in reigniting interest around our past wins (like this ABC News story we pitched and landed for National Freedom to Marry Day).

In short, we know how to make our clients in-demand sources for the media.