The easiest way to misunderstand DCI is to picture a lobbyist walking into an office on Capitol Hill. The meeting matters. But DCI's business begins with a more interesting question: what does the official hear before the meeting, and from whom? Perhaps a retired firefighter has written in the local paper. Perhaps a policy expert has supplied the respectable vocabulary. Perhaps parents have appeared at a community event. Perhaps a digital advertisement has followed the argument into precisely the right ZIP codes. By the time the door closes, the point has already arrived from several directions.
DCI calls this the “outside game.” It is a useful phrase because it describes both the company's origins and its advantage. Founded in 1996 by Tom Synhorst, Doug Goodyear and Tim Hyde, the firm began as six people, one client and a grassroots specialty. It has since grown into an independently owned operation of more than 100 professionals, with offices publicly listed in Washington, New York, Tallahassee and Brussels, plus a network that it says reaches every U.S. state and six continents.
Its customers are organizations with expensive decisions in front of them: corporations, trade associations, investors, coalitions, nonprofits and institutions facing legislation, regulation, litigation, transactions or a reputation problem. They do not buy software. They buy a campaign team and, when the model works, a more favorable environment for the decision they need.
“A lobbying meeting is one moment. DCI builds the weather around it.”YesPress field note
Nine practices, one machine
The service menu looks broad: strategic communications; crisis and litigation support; coalition management; research; public affairs and government relations; mergers and acquisitions; state and local campaigns; international work; and digital, creative and analytics. Read as a list, it resembles a modern consultancy directory. Read as a sequence, it becomes a machine.
First comes the map: who decides, what they fear, which arguments have failed and which constituencies carry weight. Next come the messengers. DCI's distinctive claim is not simply that it can draft the sentence, but that it can find someone with the standing to say it. Then the firm coordinates earned media, paid media, field activity, lobbying and digital distribution so that the message lands with repetition but not, ideally, with the fingerprints of repetition.
That last distinction matters. In public affairs, a company praising its own proposal is advertising. A local organization, parent, worker or expert making the case is evidence of a constituency. Coalition building is therefore not a decorative practice beside communications. It is the delivery system for credibility.
A campaign measured in validators
One of DCI's published case studies makes the operating model unusually visible. After Texas passed laws restricting some financial firms from doing business with state entities, related proposals began moving elsewhere. DCI says it ran three tracks: stop new bills in fresh states, prevent additional bills where laws already existed, and reframe the dispute around fiduciary duty and Americans saving for retirement.
The mechanics are worth noticing. Former governors, attorneys general, legislators, union chapters, police and firefighter groups supplied voices with different kinds of standing. Local radio and opinion pages supplied geographic specificity. A coalition created a durable wrapper around the effort. The company did not describe one magic message. It described many credible messengers, moved repeatedly.
What changed their minds?
In an 18-month campaign around a foreign acquisition of a major American steelmaker, DCI says it recruited validators in national security, economics, antitrust and local communities, then geo-targeted the argument to Washington. Its account says previously undecided and opposing officials ultimately backed the deal. The mechanism was not novelty. It was permission: credible outsiders gave officials reasons to reconsider.
Another campaign built an online-safety coalition of more than 100 organizations, engaged thousands of parents and mixed informational articles, ads and local events. DCI reports that coalition-backed legislation had passed in three states by July 2025. The lesson is not that a large coalition automatically wins. Headcount without relevance becomes a petition. The useful work is matching messenger, place, moment and ask.
What breaks first is the handoff
Crisis work reveals the same philosophy under a harsher clock. DCI argues that organizations rarely fail because nobody knows the facts. They fail because legal, communications, policy, operations and leadership cannot assemble a decision quickly enough. The first fracture is coordination.
Its answer is a rehearsal. In one recent engagement, DCI designed a two-hour tabletop exercise for roughly 20 people at a Fortune 500 company. A single scenario escalated in stages. Cross-functional teams made decisions with incomplete information, handed them off and tried to maintain one center of coordination. A “hot wash” followed, then a confidential after-action report. The deliverable was not a theatrical day in a conference room. It was a map of missing decision rights, unusable templates and relationships that did not yet exist.
This is also the clearest answer to what a reader can copy without hiring anyone: rehearse the first hour. Decide who can speak, who can approve, what gets escalated and how a cleared message moves. Test the actual people and documents. A crisis binder that has never met a clock is a theory.
The expensive shadow of client choice
Public affairs firms can inherit the reputation of the people they represent. DCI learned that publicly in 2008, when reporting resurfaced its 2002-2003 work for Myanmar's military government, for which the firm was paid $348,000. Doug Goodyear resigned from a role organizing the Republican convention so the controversy would not distract from the campaign. It is a durable caution for any advisory business: execution cannot rescue a client decision whose moral and reputational cost was mispriced at the start.
The new tool still needs an old judgment
In August 2026, DCI turned a fashionable question - what should an agency do with artificial intelligence? - into an internal build contest. Eleven mixed-level teams produced working prototypes for media intelligence, event coverage, reporting, proposals, creative production and financial analysis. The three winners were an AI advertising concept, a pricing and financial intelligence tool, and an in-house creative studio intended to make content faster and cheaper than traditional outside production.
The contest is revealing because the winning ideas sit close to agency economics. One helps sell. One helps price. One reduces production cost. DCI's own conclusion was measured: a machine can process material or generate concepts, but it cannot decide what matters, understand the audience or know when automation is a distraction. In this business, judgment is still the scarce inventory.
Four moves worth borrowing
- Name the decision. “Awareness” is fog. Identify the official, board, regulator, court, investor or public constituency whose behavior must change.
- Recruit standing, not volume. Ten trusted local validators can matter more than ten thousand anonymous clicks.
- Sequence the channels. Research should shape the messenger; the messenger should shape the story; the story should shape paid distribution and direct advocacy.
- Rehearse the handoffs. Pressure-test decision rights, approvals and templates before the first real hour begins.
The model depends on conditions that are easy to omit from a case study. The underlying position must survive scrutiny. Messengers must have real standing rather than rented enthusiasm. Local conditions must actually differ enough to reward a field network. The decision must still be contestable. And the client has to accept that a coalition cannot be treated as a row of interchangeable logos. Remove those conditions and the outside game becomes noise, or worse, a credibility problem.
DCI sits in the overlap between lobbying firms, political consultancies, PR agencies, crisis advisers and digital campaign shops. Competitors can offer any one of those pieces. DCI's pitch is the joinery: research tied to field, field tied to media, media tied to government affairs, all moving on campaign time. Thirty years after the six-person startup, its core idea remains almost stubbornly analog. Decisions move when the right people hear the same convincing argument from people they already have reason to trust.