There is a small puzzle at the center of public relations. Companies usually become interested in trust at exactly the moment trust is hardest to acquire. A permit is stalled. A reporter is calling. A neighborhood meeting has turned sour. Someone opens a laptop and asks for a message. In Denver, dovetail solutions built a business around starting earlier.
The firm was founded by Andy Boian in a small Larimer Square office in 2005. His premise joined three worlds that companies tend to keep in separate calendar invites: business, government and nonprofits. Dovetail would do the expected agency work - media relations, branding, digital marketing, crisis counsel - but it would also help a client become useful to the communities around it. The firm named that practice Strategic Community Investment, or SCI.
The name is corporate; the mechanism is almost stubbornly ordinary. Identify the people and institutions that affect a company’s ability to operate. Learn what they need. Volunteer, contribute, make introductions, join boards and remain present. Then connect that activity to a coherent public story. The press release comes near the end, not the beginning.
PR is the visible part. Access is the engine.
Dovetail now presents nine connected practices: communications strategy, media and PR, crisis management, public affairs, SCI, brand and visual identity, digital marketing, social media, and coaching. That breadth places it among integrated agencies, but its competitive claim is narrower. The firm is selling the ability to move across stakeholder groups without changing the underlying story.
The Dovetail loop
Consider its own SCI report. Dovetail says a crisis-preparedness panel produced two future clients, each of whom later called when trouble arrived. It invited Daniels Fund leadership to meet the team, then arranged for the organization’s leadership to speak at a client summit. Since 2017, donations, computers and volunteer work for SafeHouse Denver have funded more than 100 nights of shelter. In this model, service is not a sponsorship logo pasted onto a gala program. It becomes a dense network of practical familiarity.
“To be remembered, you have to show up.”Dovetail’s operating maxim
That can sound warm and conveniently unmeasurable. Dovetail tries to make it harder-edged: hours contributed, dollars donated, introductions made, speaking opportunities won, press coverage earned. Over its first two decades, the firm reported more than $110,000 in charitable contributions and more than $165,000 in sponsorships, alongside those 20,500 hours. The point is not that generosity can be reduced to a spreadsheet. It is that a business should know whether its professed values ever left the building.
A financial hit, then a wider map
The firm’s anniversary history names 2008 as its first big financial setback. It does not offer a cinematic rescue scene. What the record shows instead is a series of widening moves: work in San Francisco and Washington, a Northern California office, the acquisitions of Story+Welch and Modamedia Communications, a major rebrand and a five-year growth plan set in 2021. By 2025, Dovetail described itself as a multi-million-dollar company with clients across the country.
The lesson is less “pivot” than portfolio. A company dependent on one city, one service or one kind of relationship is fragile. Dovetail added geography and capability while keeping the same thesis. Today it works for businesses, nonprofits, government entities, associations and individual leaders. Named client partners span real estate, construction, healthcare, hospitality, education, law and civic institutions.
Five months of bad news. Twelve-plus years of rebuilding.
In 2011, a project crisis brought five months of negative coverage to the Fort Collins design-build firm. Dovetail counseled the response, then changed the subject with evidence: completed projects, interviews, events, awards and expert commentary. A mayor spoke at one opening; six media hits followed. By 2023, a New York Times reporter found an earlier bylined article and interviewed Neenan as a source. Reputation recovery looked less like erasing a headline than patiently publishing a new body of work.
This is what Dovetail actually does at its best: it coordinates. A crisis plan informs media training. Media work creates thought leadership. Public affairs maps the people who can slow or support a project. Community work supplies credible proof that the client is participating rather than parachuting in. Brand and digital teams keep all of it legible.
A custom shop with no public menu
There is no software subscription and no public rate card. Independent agency directory Clutch lists both minimum project size and hourly rate as undisclosed. Boian has described the commercial mix as project work and retainers, with custom work favored over rinse-and-repeat packages. In plain English: a buyer explains the knot, and Dovetail scopes the people and disciplines needed to untie it.
A leader, development, institution or brand with several audiences and a problem that crosses media, civic and commercial lines.
A buyer seeking a commodity content factory, a self-serve platform or direct lobbying. Dovetail explicitly says it does not lobby.
Organizations buy counsel, execution and access to a coordinated senior team, either for a defined project or an ongoing relationship.
The model works when leaders can commit time, behave consistently and let community priorities influence the plan.
The last condition matters. Community-centered PR fails when “community” is treated as an audience to manipulate. It also loses its advantage when a company cannot act in public, cannot sustain participation or wants the legal powers of a lobbyist. Relationships take longer than ads, and they impose obligations. That is the hidden cost of this approach - not merely the agency invoice, but executive attention and the willingness to be changed by what stakeholders say.
Copy the sequence, not the slogans
A reader does not need an agency to borrow the core idea. The most portable Dovetail insight is chronological: do not begin with amplification. Begin with relevance. A useful community strategy is specific enough to name the people, places and institutions involved; modest enough to start without a camera; and disciplined enough to measure whether anyone benefited.
A five-move field guide
- Map every group with the power to affect the outcome - including critics.
- Ask what those groups already care about before proposing a campaign.
- Choose one contribution the organization can sustain for years, not weeks.
- Connect operating behavior, executive voice and public messaging to the same promise.
- Track trust through actions: invitations, repeat participation, referrals and faster resolution - not impressions alone.
Dovetail’s culture mirrors that argument. The firm publishes a hybrid rhythm of three office days, flexible scheduling and planned remote work. It says it invested more than $135,000 in professional development over 20 years. In 2025, it was named a finalist in the small-company category of the Denver Business Journal’s Best Places to Work program. In 2026, former Vectra Bank Colorado chief Bruce Alexander became board chair, bringing another set of business, health and civic connections to the table.
Twenty years on, the interesting thing about Dovetail is not that it has discovered a secret channel. It has insisted that the oldest channel - a person repeatedly appearing where they said they would - belongs in modern communications strategy. There are faster ways to buy attention. There may not be a shortcut to being believed.