The Crowd Is the Message: How 720 Strategies Turns Attention Into Influence

In Washington, the shortest route between an idea and a law is rarely a straight line. It runs through a nurse practitioner in a television ad, a chamber-of-commerce president in North Dakota, a drive-time radio host, a congressional staffer's inbox and, if the machinery is working, a constituent who decides to speak. 720 Strategies has spent more than 25 years drawing those routes.

The company calls itself an integrated public relations and public affairs agency. Accurate, but bloodless. What it really sells is coordinated pressure. A client arrives with an audience problem - policymakers do not understand a profession, employees do not engage with an advocacy program, supporters do not know when to act - and 720 assembles the research, message, website, advertisement, local messenger and follow-up sequence meant to change that behavior.

That makes the firm less like a megaphone than a switchboard. Its people connect the voices already scattered around an issue and route them toward the few listeners who matter most.

“The needle wasn't moving.”720 Strategies, describing a four-year awareness gap

The stubborn half

Consider a problem posed by the American Association of Nurse Practitioners. Americans trusted nurse practitioners, but many did not understand what they could actually do. A national poll of 1,000 registered voters found that only 50 percent knew nurse practitioners could prescribe medication. The arresting detail was not the number by itself. The same question had produced the same result four years earlier.

Recognition had stalled. More of the old message would merely reproduce the old result. So 720 designed a 120-day “surround sound” campaign for Washington's healthcare policy class. It put nurse practitioners in 25 national cable television spots and 186 drive-time radio spots. It sent a public-service version to more than 175 television stations, convened two Capitol Hill briefings, recruited patient advocates as third-party witnesses and held a National Press Club event. The press release traveled to 331 news sites across more than 14 countries and generated 5.95 million online impressions.

The clever part was not the media volume. It was the diagnosis. Trust was not the problem; comprehension was. The campaign therefore showed scope of practice, put patients beside practitioners and repeated the explanation in the places policy professionals already looked. It did not ask every American to become an expert. It asked a compact network of influential people to stop overlooking a ready-made answer to a primary-care shortage.

A company born before the feed

Pam Fielding founded the business in 1999 as E-Advocates, when “online advocacy” sounded sufficiently novel to require explanation. The early proposition was simple: the internet could help organizations find supporters, teach them an issue and turn them into participants. In one campaign recalled by Edutopia, email outreach helped bring roughly 1,000 people to a Fairfax school-board meeting over teacher pay.

The tools multiplied, but the underlying sequence survived. The firm now offers strategic communications, media relations, digital marketing, grassroots and grasstops organizing, web development, creative production, and PAC fundraising and compliance. PACMaster, its management platform, connects political giving records with advocacy systems. Each service looks separate on an invoice. In practice, they are stages of one machine.

This is also the most copyable part of 720's work. Begin with a behavioral gap, not a preferred channel. Name the people who can move the decision. Learn what they believe. Recruit messengers they already consider legitimate. Then coordinate the touches and make the next action obvious. The tactic can be borrowed by an association with a small policy team just as easily as by a Fortune 500 company.

Proof measured in fewer phone calls

Agency case studies tend to count impressions because impressions are abundant and obedient. 720's more interesting results measure changed behavior. For Target's Citizens@Target initiative, the team rebuilt the advocacy site around mobile use and simpler navigation. Monthly page views rose 200 percent. For the Federation of American Hospitals, it reorganized an overwhelming archive into a responsive “one-stop shop.” In the first two months, the site recorded more than 9,800 page views from 2,665 users. Better still, the federation saw a sharp reduction in calls from people asking where to find material.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce case shows the field side of the same idea. For a national energy coalition, 720 recruited more than 250 business, civic and legislative allies in targeted districts and states. Those local partners signed letters, appeared at events and supplied opinion pieces. The campaign produced more than 500 media hits. National print advertising provided scale; local validators provided permission to believe it.

The alternative is familiar: hire one shop for PR, another for ads, buy advocacy software and ask an internal government-affairs team to coordinate the handoffs. 720's differentiation is integration. It keeps research, creative, digital distribution, field recruitment and political-action work close enough to respond to one another. That matters when a campaign has 120 days, not 12 months.

Healthcare becomes the center

More than 70 percent of the firm's clients now come from healthcare and energy. In May 2023, Health Management Associates acquired 720, making the agency part of a larger healthcare consultancy. The logic is plain. Communications becomes more useful when its practitioners understand regulation, reimbursement and the political landscape; policy advice becomes more useful when somebody can translate it for patients, communities and decision-makers.

The company today lists Vlad Cartwright as CEO and Fielding as founder and senior advisor. Its public roster remains small - LinkedIn places it in the 11-to-50 employee range - while its clients include corporations, professional associations, nonprofits and government agencies. That size encourages a business model built on senior counsel, retained relationships and project campaigns, rather than a self-serve product with a posted price.

The HMA connection also changes the market position. 720 is no longer only competing with Washington public-affairs agencies. It can now sit inside a health-policy engagement where research, regulation, community outreach and communications are purchased together. Recent public work in Delaware, for example, places HMA and 720 alongside community partners designing local awareness efforts around opioid and stimulant use disorders.

The limit is legitimacy

A system this tidy has strict conditions. It works when a client has a specific decision to influence, a real constituency to mobilize, credible people willing to speak and enough time for repeated contact. It weakens when the evidence is poor, when the “grassroots” are merely rented names, when every audience receives the same message or when publicity is treated as a substitute for policy. Coordination can amplify trust. It cannot manufacture it indefinitely.

There is a smaller lesson here for anyone trying to persuade. Do not begin by asking, “What should we post?” Begin with the person whose action would alter the situation. What does that person misunderstand? Whom do they trust? What is the smallest useful thing they can do next? Those questions are less glamorous than a viral idea and more likely to survive contact with the world.

The firm's name suggests a full turn twice over: online and offline, public attention and private decision, message sent and response returned. The circle only closes when somebody acts. Everything before that is communication. The action is the strategy.