The most revealing number in Goff Public’s portfolio is not a follower count. It is 137-6. That was the vote by which delegates of Catholic United Financial approved a merger with another fraternal insurer. The board wanted the deal. The delegates had the power to stop it. And the institution was nearly 150 years old, rich in traditions of local volunteering and grassroots governance - exactly the sort of place where “management recommends” does not automatically mean “members agree.”
Goff Public’s solution was less glamorous than a slogan and more useful than one. It built a plan of key messages and candid Q&As. It arranged emails, physical mail, phone calls and listening sessions. It made videos in which leaders from both organizations explained the proposal. The agency gave the same argument several shapes because people do not all trust the same channel, or make up their minds on the same afternoon.
This is the central fact about the Saint Paul firm. It calls itself a public relations and public affairs agency, but its real product is coordinated understanding. Sometimes that understanding must travel through a newsroom. Sometimes it has to survive a committee hearing. Sometimes it needs to reach a homeowner who finds a doorhanger announcing that the street will be torn up. The job is to discover which room matters, what that room fears, and what evidence might let it move.
The agency with two front doors
Bob Goff and Nick Coleman opened the business in 1966. They were advertising men and political creatures, a combination that explains the firm’s unusual architecture. Most agencies choose a front door: communications on one side, government relations on the other. Goff Public built both. Its roughly two-dozen-person team offers media relations, crisis counsel and communications audits alongside lobbying, coalition building, public-opinion research and political strategy. Community engagement, digital campaigns, design, photography and video fill the space between.
That mix is the distinction. A global PR network can provide scale; a specialist lobby shop may offer deeper reach in a single policy niche; an in-house team carries intimate knowledge of one organization. Goff Public’s wager is that Minnesota organizations often need the disciplines to touch. A legislative proposal needs testimony and a fact sheet. A construction project needs public meetings and paid social posts. A merger needs member calls and executive video. Hiring separate firms creates handoffs precisely where meaning tends to leak.
“Be a student of human nature.”Chris Georgacas, chairman, recalling the lesson he would give his younger self
Geography matters here. The agency is not pretending that a clever dashboard replaces knowing Minnesota reporters, civic leaders and lawmakers. Its public-affairs team describes lobbying as being a client’s eyes and ears in government. Its executives sit on local boards. Its headquarters remains downtown, nine floors above Cedar Street. Those relationships are an operating asset, not lobby décor.
First, find the actual problem
When Macalester College asked for help with campus and alumni communications, Goff Public did not begin by prescribing a newsletter. It conducted nearly 50 individual and group interviews, spoke with five peer institutions, collected more than 300 internal survey responses, and studied existing materials and analytics. Only then did it produce two audits and recommendations.
The sequence is worth stealing. Interview before recommending. Separate audiences whose needs have been lazily bundled together. Compare what leaders believe they send with what recipients say they receive. Put objections into the plan while they are still questions, not yet grievances. The method is not proprietary. The discipline to complete it often is.
The repeatable part / four moves
Map the rooms. List every audience with the power to approve, delay, misunderstand or amplify the decision.
Listen for friction. Use interviews, surveys, monitoring and meetings to find the real objection before writing the line.
Match channel to trust. A lawmaker may need a facility tour; a neighbor may need a translated postcard; a reporter may need a demonstration.
Count action. Votes, applications, attendance and enacted policy say more than impressions alone.
The agency applied the same logic to two years of road construction along Highway 5, Minnehaha Avenue and Stillwater Road. The obstacle was not a lack of information. It was the inconvenient distribution of the people who needed it: residents, shops, schools, district councils and public agencies, speaking different languages and paying attention at different times. The team used meetings, doorhangers, postcards, local ads, social media and community events. More than 130,000 people were reached; over 600 engaged in person; 19 organizations and government entities participated in meetings.
Make the thing easy to see
The firm can also produce a spectacle when the object deserves one. Border Foods was opening Taco Bell Defy, a two-story, four-lane drive-through in Brooklyn Park where food descended to customers through a vertical lift. Goff Public made explanatory visuals, prepared media materials and hosted a reporter-only tour with a demonstration. The launch generated 33 Minnesota news hits and an estimated 24.3 million-person reach.
The trick was not to decorate the novelty. It was to let reporters operate it. A useful demonstration compresses an explanation into an experience. That principle travels well: if your product looks confusing in a paragraph, build a tour, sample, simulation or before-and-after that lets another person retell it without your help.
For Newgate School, the visual hook was already present: twelve cars given to twelve mothers before Christmas. But a holiday photo can vanish on December 26. Goff Public centered the school’s year-round automotive training and Wheels for Women model, then paired pre-event television pitches with day-of coordination and professional photography. Nine major placements produced an estimated 4.1 million potential audience and more than 400 program applications. The agency and event partners donated the work.
The cost of a Goff engagement is not published. The business is bespoke professional services - projects and ongoing counsel shaped around the problem. That opacity is common in agency work, but it puts pressure on the buyer to define outcomes before scope. A client should know whether it needs votes, applicants, informed neighbors, trained spokespeople or simply attention. Goff Public’s own promise that it will not sell work a client does not need is useful only when both sides can name what success is.
A company that inherited itself
Jen Hellman joined Goff Public in 1998, just out of college, and became president and CEO in 2022. This is a rare succession story: the apprentice did not leave to become a rival; she stayed long enough to inherit the institution. Hellman specializes in the severe end of communications - crises, reputational risk and the decisions leaders make when the facts are incomplete and every sentence will be examined.
The culture carries the same preference for candor. Goff Public names integrity, inclusion, authenticity, accountability, teamwork and excellence as its values. More concretely, it reports giving over 5% of gross earnings each year to nonprofit organizations through pro bono work, training, board service, volunteering and donations. The Minneapolis Regional Chamber recognized that commitment with its 2023 Minnesota Keystone Award. The office also keeps a handmade holiday figurine called “Father Goff,” modeled after the founder. Institutional memory, apparently, can wear a tiny robe.
A Minnesota organization facing a public decision with several audiences: employees, members, neighbors, journalists, advocates or lawmakers.
A company seeking cheap, instant volume; a global rollout requiring offices in many countries; or a leader unwilling to hear inconvenient audience research.
The approach is not magic. Listening sessions cannot rescue a decision made in bad faith. Local relationships do not automatically transfer to another state. A media launch can create curiosity but not fix a weak product. And the careful, multi-channel work of persuasion costs more time than firing off a statement. The method works when leaders are still willing to change the message, the route, or occasionally the decision after listening.
That condition explains Goff Public’s durability. Channels have changed since 1966; human resistance has not. People still want to know who benefits, what happens next, whether anyone heard them, and whom they can trust. The firm’s work begins in that interval between announcement and belief. Sixty years later, it remains a crowded room.