Mozaic knows who carries the message

A community organization can know everyone on its block and still have nobody available to speak to a reporter. That small inconvenience sits inside a much larger communications problem: the people closest to an audience may have the least spare time to help a campaign reach it.

Mozaic Media + Communications encountered that constraint while working on Listos California. Its account describes a learning curve: local grantees needed help with media relations, and participation depended on their capacity and interest. The firm selected willing partners, developed story ideas with them and trained dozens of groups.

This is a revealing detail to find in an agency portfolio. It takes the discussion out of the land of clever slogans and into the calendar. Who can actually do the work? Who needs help? Who already has something worth saying?

The campaign changed. So did the assignment.

California launched Listos in 2019 to help vulnerable residents prepare for disasters. The state allocated $50 million to the broader effort. Then COVID-19 arrived. Mozaic’s preparedness assignment became rapid-response communications, with changing information delivered in multiple languages. The firm reports 255 earned-media stories.

That $50 million belongs to the public program’s budget. Treating it as the agency’s fee would badly misread the work. The distinction matters because communications firms often operate inside initiatives much larger than themselves: the consultant, the grants and the delivery network all belong in different columns.

A policy career with a producer’s eye

Founded in 2007, Mozaic serves public, private and nonprofit clients. Its founder and managing partner, Aram Nadjarian, brings an unusually relevant mix of experience to assignments involving government and public attention. He worked as a senior adviser and chief of staff to California Environmental Protection Agency Secretary Linda Adams, and as an environmental policy adviser to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

His biography also includes television production. The connection is useful: a policy has to survive institutional scrutiny, while a story has to hold someone’s attention. Mozaic’s portfolio repeatedly puts those demands in the same room. The founder’s experience helps explain that orientation without making every campaign an extension of his biography.

In his University of Sussex alumni account, Nadjarian describes growing up in Los Angeles with immigrant parents and learning from mentors in entertainment and community activism. His description of education is strikingly conversational for a communications executive:

“Sussex became my home away from home - my incubator that inspired me to listen more”Aram Nadjarian · University of Sussex

The company names integrity, authenticity and creativity as its values. More concretely, its published team brings together advisers, account staff, a creative lead and a social media lead. Linda Adams appears as an executive adviser. This gives clients access to different kinds of work within one engagement: institutional counsel, audience-facing materials and day-to-day execution.

The toolkit before the applause

For California 100, an initiative examining the state’s future, the assignment was to attract attention to policy reports and events. Mozaic worked over four months, preparing graphics, copy and toolkits that the initiative and its partners could distribute through their own accounts. Paid Twitter advertising supplemented the organic effort.

The Sacramento event’s branding borrowed inspiration from John Lennon’s “War Is Over” poster. According to Mozaic, attendance exceeded the event’s goal. The useful detail is the prepared toolkit: it lowered the effort required for a partner to participate. A request to help promote something arrives with homework. Suggested copy and finished graphics do some of that homework in advance.

Getting from a program to a person

Higher education provides another view of the firm’s work. For the Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities, Mozaic organized a student-centered campaign against proposed Cal Grant cuts. Its account describes nearly 15,000 petition signers and more than 150 media mentions and broadcast stories. The company says the eventual legislative compromise kept the program intact.

The interesting move was to bring students into an argument that could otherwise have remained a discussion among institutions. A budget line becomes easier to understand when someone can explain what it changes in their life. The legislative outcome still belongs to a larger political process; the communications campaign was one participant in it.

For College Corps, Mozaic describes a different role: prime contractor managing senior consultants on a statewide marketing and communications effort. The assignment combined creative materials, earned media, campus events and research, with particular attention to underrepresented students. The program launched with 48 colleges and universities.

This is a useful way to assess an agency: look for the action at the end of the message. An application is closer to participation than a view or a mention, although it still cannot establish how much of the result came from any one contractor.

Sometimes the deliverable is a working routine

Mozaic’s services include coalition building, community forums, web and graphic design, video production, social media management, corporate communications and crisis work. Clients buy professional judgment and execution. Its documented agency-of-record and prime-contractor assignments place it in the market for outsourced communications teams and public affairs support.

For the Los Angeles County Arts Education Collective, one of its early deliverables was a communications roadmap: an assessment of needs, recommendations and an operating approach for consistent outbound messages. The work also included newsletters, design, social media and earned coverage. Here, the planning document helped organize an ongoing job.

For the Los Angeles Community College District, Mozaic promoted concrete benefits such as fareless transit and real estate appraisal courses linked to the County Assessor’s office. It also revised website language around students’ interests. These examples suggest a useful discipline: find the detail a person can use, then build the institutional story around it.

The same firm supported nonpartisan Vote Safe California outreach for the 2021 recall election, working with Ethnic Media Services. It reports 91 broadcast and online mentions in six weeks. Its James Irvine Foundation Leadership Awards work involved identifying stories about award recipients and supporting coverage through writing, media relations and press events.

Start with the people who can say yes

The transferable lesson across these assignments is modest and demanding. Give partners something usable. Match the message to a specific audience. Decide whether success means attention, attendance or an application. Leave time for people to learn a task they have not done before.

That approach depends on participation. A toolkit needs someone willing to post it; training needs someone available to use it. If an organization has no capacity to respond, more materials can simply create a larger pile. The sensible first question for a campaign is therefore wonderfully ordinary: who has the time, the connection and a reason to help?

Mozaic’s work is most distinctive at that intersection of public institutions and local delivery. The firm’s service list is broad. The recurring problem underneath it is precise: helping information reach people through organizations and voices close enough to matter.