In the origin story of DH, there is a bar napkin. Jim and Cher Desautel were at Elkins Resort on Priest Lake in 1996 when they sketched the plan for a Spokane communications firm. Bar-napkin companies are supposed to begin with a revelation. This one began with a gap. Spokane had capable public-relations people, but many of the firms serving the city were based somewhere else. The Desautels believed the region deserved an agency rooted in it.
Then the weather supplied an opening. During Ice Storm '96, Jim called Washington Water Power, now Avista, and offered help. The utility became one of the young firm's first clients; the Colville Tribes became another. Two years later, the Desautels hired their first employee, Michelle Hege. She became a partner in 2000 and chief executive in 2013. The company eventually shortened Desautel Hege to DH, acquired Seattle agency Nyhus Communications in 2022, and broadened its reach without losing the local thesis hidden in the napkin.
The agency that makes the room bigger
Today DH calls itself a social impact agency. The label is more precise than it first appears. The company still does what an integrated agency is expected to do: brand strategy, advertising, media buying, public relations, crisis counsel, digital experiences, websites, content and research. Its client list crosses Washington state agencies, health systems, universities, nonprofits, associations and companies. Alaska Airlines, the University of Oregon, Tree Top, Virginia Mason, King County Metro and the Washington State Health Care Authority have all used its services.
But the interesting product is the order of operations. DH puts research and community participation before creative certainty. The agency says it has relationships with more than 230 community organizations and media outlets representing diverse Washington populations. That is not simply a distribution list. It is a working network that can question a brief, identify a barrier, test an idea, customize a toolkit and carry information through a trusted voice.
This is a subtle transfer of authority. A conventional campaign may ask an audience which finished concept it prefers. DH's stronger work asks much earlier questions: What makes the institution hard to trust? Who already has credibility? Which social behavior should the message reinforce? What details would make the creative feel like somebody's real life rather than an outsider's tidy portrait of it?
“The people closest to a problem are also closest to the solution.”DH's operating principle
What changed when the audience entered
Consider Friends for Life, a fentanyl and naloxone education campaign for the Washington State Health Care Authority. DH began with a statewide survey, expert interviews, public-health research and conversations with people who use drugs and their families. The research exposed a useful tension. Washington residents were frightened that someone they loved might die, but they wanted practical information about keeping one another safe. Young adults knew the least about fentanyl and were less likely to carry naloxone, even as their overdose rates rose fastest.
The easiest creative response would have been fear. Instead, after several concepts were tested with focus groups, the agency and client chose care. Friends for Life used the language of friendship, helpful action and connection. Its badge-like identity carried a little summer-camp warmth. Parents tested public-service concepts; prevention professionals, young people and syringe-service providers reviewed creative. The campaign did not pretend drug use could be frightened out of existence. It told people what they could do for someone they cared about.
A 2025 safe-rides campaign for the Washington Traffic Safety Commission shows the same mechanism at work. DH tested two concepts with English- and Spanish-speaking adults in urban and rural Washington. Focus-group participants cared about the characters checking on one another after a night out, a small and recognizable act. That exchange became a foundation for print and digital ads. The Spanish-language work went beyond translating copy: settings, food, clothing, music and the hour of the gathering changed. That is transcreation in practice - not new words pasted onto the same old assumptions.
Selected reported campaign reach
Mile-wide meets mile-deep
The most revealing evidence came during COVID-19. A mass campaign could be “mile-wide,” but the Washington State Department of Health knew it also needed to go mile-deep. Institutional distrust, historical trauma, language, transportation and limited access to technology did not yield to a larger media buy. DH helped coordinate investment with more than 175 community organizations, reaching over 2.3 million of Washington's 7.6 million residents.
In eastern Washington, the agency and Better Health Together supported leaders in BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and rural communities who were already doing the work. Community organizations hosted clinics and events; DH co-created materials and used local voices in paid media. The partners hosted 46 vaccine clinics and delivered more than 6,800 vaccinations. DH's own case study resists taking sole credit, noting the many organizations, providers and public-health professionals involved. That modest sentence is strategic truth. When trust belongs to the community, the agency cannot claim to have manufactured it.
The model also travels beyond health. For a Washington small-business loan fund, research surfaced fear of debt and distrust of big banks. DH emphasized trusted community lenders, mailed rural and Spanish-language materials, placed ads in media serving BIPOC audiences, and put borrowers in testimonial videos. The campaign recorded 18 million impressions and more than 53,000 clicks. In Charlotte, a three-month loan-fund campaign built around local owners' stories reached 298,000 people and nearly doubled applications, producing 90 new applications and 24 matches between qualified owners and lenders.
The useful thing to steal
DH's process can be copied without copying its ads. First, budget participation as real work, not a late-stage opinion poll. Recruit people with lived experience before the brief hardens. Pay community partners when their labor and credibility make the campaign possible. Test the emotional premise, not only the wording. Separate translation from transcreation. Give local organizations materials they can customize. Measure the action that matters - an application, a clinic visit, a safe ride - alongside reach.
There are conditions. The method needs time to listen, money to support partners, and a client willing to surrender some control. It is ill-suited to an organization that wants community faces but not community influence. It also cannot repair a service that remains inaccessible or an institution that behaves in ways its campaign contradicts. Communications can make a trustworthy action visible; they cannot perform the action for you.
The agency itself continues to widen. Nyhus brought crisis, high-stakes and health-care expertise in Seattle. IPREX, a network of independent agencies, provides international reach. In 2026 DH described a human-centered approach to AI, including an activity-matching tool designed to help older adults find local connections. The technology is new. The governing question is familiar: does this increase access and clarity, and who might it leave out?
The bar napkin remains a charming first draft. The better artifact is the empty chair DH keeps pulling into the room. It belongs to the patient, driver, shop owner, tribal member, student or neighbor whose behavior appears in the objective line of a creative brief. Agencies are paid to know what to say. DH's most transferable idea is knowing who should say it.