The Small Firm in Albuquerque That Studies What People Believe

The interesting thing about a crisis is how long it looks manageable. A phrase appears in a local post. A complaint migrates into a private group. A video acquires a caption it never had. Then, suddenly, everyone has seen it and nobody agrees on what it means. By the time the communications team convenes, the argument has already chosen its winners.

Agenda, LLC has built a business around that vanishing interval between the first signal and the settled story. The company is based in Albuquerque, employs roughly 17 people, and looks on paper like a public relations agency. Its work is broader and stranger than that label suggests. Agenda studies audiences, maps stakeholders, monitors narratives, prepares executives for crises, builds advertising and media campaigns, and trains people who may need to communicate while a country is under attack.

This is communications as an operating system, not a press office. The customer is not merely asking, “What should we say?” The harder questions arrive first: What is happening? Who believes what? Which voices are trusted? What would a win look like? And how quickly can we learn whether anything moved?

The product is a loop

Agenda began in 2012 as a partnership led by public-affairs operators Douglas Turner, Craig Pattee and Max Hamel. The pitch was national reach without big-agency drag. Today, Turner is founder and CEO, and the company describes a campaign-focused method that starts with a surprisingly unfashionable exercise: define success.

Only then does the machinery start. Researchers examine the market and the audience. Strategists map allies, opponents and cultural cues. Writers and designers make the message concrete. Media, digital and field teams put it into circulation. Analysts watch the response and revise. There is no grand mystery here. The distinction lies in treating the last step as the beginning of the next cycle.

Its proprietary Reverse Access Population Targeting capability, or RAPT, makes that loop more pointed. Agenda says it first developed RAPT for NATO strategic communications in adverse information environments. It combines audience analysis with signals about devices and online habits, then delivers customized content against a defined objective. In ordinary agency language, that sounds like targeting. In a censored or contested media system, the problem is also access: how do you reach the intended population at all?

“Understanding the operating environment is the first step to shaping it.”Agenda’s description of situational awareness

What failed first

The most useful evidence of how Agenda works comes from a moment when the system did not work. The firm once monitored news and social media with several data-mining tools, alerts and manual tasks. That arrangement was cumbersome and too slow for effective crisis management. Nothing dramatic exploded. The workflow simply could not keep pace with the environment it was supposed to explain.

Agenda switched to Primer Command and Primer Analyze, putting multilingual open-source feeds, alerts, maps, volume trends, topic analysis and sentiment into one view. The platform can follow custom queries across 100 languages and translate material into English. Turner has said the firm uses it for early warning around operational security, business continuity and reputation.

The change matters because it clarifies what the firm actually sells. Software can surface the signal. Agenda’s billable contribution is the judgment that follows: whether a spike matters, which audience is moving, what response would make conditions better, and whether silence is wiser. It is the old consulting promise, made against a much faster clock.

From all 50 states to all 32 allies

At launch, Agenda talked about running corporate campaigns across all 50 states. Its more distinctive proof point arrived through NATO. The firm says it began supporting the alliance in 2011, won a formal strategic communications framework in 2015, and secured another framework in 2021 that continues through 2028. The relationship has grown to nearly 100 task orders. Its work has included research and polling, brand and advertising projects, digital campaigns, creative services, stakeholder engagement and the #WeAreNATO campaign, which won a 2018 Reed Award.

In May 2026, Agenda announced a multi-year NATO contract to lead strategic communications education and training for the Defence Forces of Ukraine. The program is to be delivered largely in Ukraine with the StratCom Academy. Agenda is responsible for instructors, course material, logistics and post-course reporting. The subjects include coordinated communications planning, public affairs, information operations and assessment of the information environment.

That contract explains the company’s market position better than a list of services can. Agenda is not trying to outspend a global advertising network. It assembles a senior core and specialist partners around a defined mission. For its 2021 NATO framework, the named team stretched from Madrid and the United Kingdom to Belgium. The company’s advantage is orchestration: one compact front door into research, counsel, creative and deployment.

What it costs to buy judgment

Private campaign budgets stay private, but government procurement leaves clues. Agenda’s 2025 GSA schedule lists a $100 minimum order and a $1 million maximum order under that vehicle. Published hourly ceiling rates range from $53.86 for a training coordinator to $480.81 for an executive strategic adviser. Principals are listed at $244.80 an hour; directors at $146.88. Task orders can be fixed-price, hourly or time-and-materials.

The business model is therefore familiar consulting economics with unusually broad procurement access. Agenda sells projects and labor through its GSA schedule, OASIS+, agency blanket purchase agreements and NATO frameworks. In September 2026 it added NASA SEWP VI, a government-wide route for agencies to buy technology, communications and audio-visual solutions. Federal customers named by the company include the Department of Defense, State Department, FEMA, USDA and the Department of the Interior. It also names USAID, UN Women, universities, energy providers and private companies.

The part worth copying

Most organizations can borrow Agenda’s sequence without buying its tools. Begin with the desired change, not the desired content. Separate the audience you need from the audience you happen to have. Watch behavior and narrative movement, not merely likes. Put creative and analysis in the same room. Decide in advance what evidence would cause you to change course.

There are limits. This model depends on a measurable objective, access to credible data, permission to act quickly and leadership willing to revise its own assumptions. It is a poor fit when the real problem is a broken product, unlawful conduct or institutional distrust that no campaign can repair. Targeting also carries privacy and ethical obligations, particularly when device behavior, vulnerable populations or national-security work is involved. Better information does not excuse bad judgment.

Agenda’s B Corp certification, first achieved in 2021 and renewed in 2025, puts that tension in view rather than resolving it. The firm asks to be judged both on results and on governance, workers, community, environment and customers. For a company involved in influence and defense, accountability is not decorative. It is part of the product.

The old model of public relations imagined an organization at a lectern and the public in rows of chairs. Agenda’s world looks more like weather: many pressures, moving fronts, imperfect instruments, forecasts that expire. The firm’s proposition is modest but valuable. You cannot control the atmosphere. You can learn to read it sooner.