The People Who Bring Pizza to a Pipe Meeting

At a public meeting in North Linden, the subject was lead service lines. The room held about 300 people. There were iPads for residents to look up their own pipes, extra chairs when the crowd outgrew the setup, and pizza. Lots of pizza. The meeting had a friendly name - Pipes and Pizza - because almost nobody clears an evening for “municipal utility compliance.” Yet everybody drinks the water.

This is the useful oddity at the center of MurphyEpson. It is a communications company, but its raw material is not glamour. It is stormwater. Bus lanes. Sump pumps. Lakefront access. Lead and copper rules. The Columbus, Ohio firm lives in the narrow, consequential distance between an engineer’s correct answer and a resident’s entirely reasonable question: What will happen on my street?

Founded by Kathleen Murphy in 1989 and now led by owner, president and CEO Marie Silver Keister, MurphyEpson describes itself through three practices: communication, engagement and public affairs. That tidy list conceals a messier job. Cities and infrastructure teams hire it when a technically sound plan still needs public understanding, participation or consent. Private firms and nonprofits hire it for the same blend of policy fluency, creative production, media relations and stakeholder work.

The first thing to fail was the notice

Public involvement comes with rules: notices, mailers, website posts and comment windows. These create a record. They do not necessarily create a representative conversation. MurphyEpson managing director Tim Bates has written that “checking the regulatory boxes isn’t enough.” The people with time, transport, confidence and fluency to attend a formal meeting are not a random sample of the neighborhood.

The firm’s response is almost aggressively practical. Talk one-on-one. Set up at festivals and grocery stores. Recruit neighborhood organizations. Translate the material. Offer dinner and childcare. Use a short mobile survey for the person who will never sit through a two-hour presentation. And when someone gives input, close the loop by showing what happened to it.

“First, we listen.” The line is plain enough to sound obvious. In civic work, obvious things are often the first things removed by a deadline.MurphyEpson’s stated sequence: discovery, strategy, delivery

What changed the tactic was evidence of a mismatch. A client returned with a 2021 outreach plan built around legal advertisements. Bates recommended targeted social advertising instead. The firm says the switch saved $500 and reached a broader audience concentrated around the project area. The lesson is not that Instagram has defeated the newspaper. It is that a channel should earn its place by finding the affected people, not by looking official in a binder.

A bus stop can be a showroom

For LinkUS, Central Ohio’s regional mobility initiative, the abstract proposition is enormous: rapid transit, sidewalks, bikeways, stations and land-use change across growing corridors. MurphyEpson helped make one slice visible. At three COTA stops on West Broad Street, riders could point a phone at the familiar street and explore an augmented-reality version of its possible future. More than 500 community members joined guided corridor tours. The work earned a Central Ohio PRSA PRism Award.

Technology was the novelty, not the whole method. An earlier phase of LinkUS East-West engagement, delivered by a wider consultant team that included MurphyEpson, recorded more than 850 direct engagements, 12,400 promotional-video views, more than 16,150 unique page visitors and about 330,000 social impressions. The revealing number is 850. Impressions tell a planner who may have glanced. Direct engagement tells the planner who stayed long enough to disagree.

The same instinct appears in less futuristic work. Blueprint Columbus is a 30-year effort to reduce sewer overflows through pipe repairs, residential improvements and green infrastructure. MurphyEpson’s mix includes door hangers, yard signs, quarterly newsletters, construction emails, paid campaigns, lemonade stands and public meetings with burgers and brats. A cartoon cat has explained pervious pavers on social media. The subject remains serious; the invitation is allowed to be human.

The price of making technical work public

MurphyEpson does not publish a rate card, and its private contracts stay private. Municipal records provide a rare view. In 2024, Columbus authorized a three-year professional-services contract worth up to $546,975.55 for lead-service-line public information outreach. The assignment included messaging, design, resident inquiries, feedback reporting and support for construction teams. A separate 2024 modification added up to $629,060 for continuing Blueprint Columbus outreach.

Those figures are not a menu of MurphyEpson prices. They show the scope governments now attach to communication: citywide outreach, regulatory deadlines, resident-response systems and years of neighborhood construction. The agency’s business is project and retainer work for public bodies, nonprofits and private organizations. Its customer roster runs from COTA, ODOT and the cities of Columbus and Cleveland to engineering and construction firms such as AECOM, HDR, Jacobs, Kokosing and WSP.

The space between PR and planning

A conventional agency can create a campaign. An engineering consultancy can explain a design. An in-house public-information team knows the institution. MurphyEpson’s position is the overlap: certified planners beside writers, designers, media specialists and engagement managers. The firm competes with all three alternatives, plus regional agencies, by claiming enough technical and policy fluency to ask better questions before making the brochure.

The model travels beyond Columbus, but it is not placeless. For Cleveland’s North Coast plan, MurphyEpson and its partners worked through grocery stores, cultural organizations, multilingual materials, focus groups and more than 20 local groups. Schoolchildren drew their lakefront ideas. Residents could “walk the boulevard” painted on pavement. The campaign won the 2024 Central Ohio PRSA Best of Show award in the nonprofit category.

Consent has prerequisites

This approach works only while participation can still matter. A meal does not rescue a meeting held after every consequential choice has been locked. Clear language cannot repair a client that withholds bad news. A clever social post cannot substitute for a response when construction damages a yard. And hyper-local outreach is labor-intensive; it loses its advantage when a client wants national scale without local partners, time or decision-making flexibility.

That is the condition hidden inside the phrase “build trust.” The firm must be able to prove that listening changes something - a design, a schedule, a message, or at least the quality of the answer. MurphyEpson’s best work makes that proof visible. It brings the future to a bus stop, the pipe map to an iPad and the planner to the grocery store.

There is a tendency to treat communications as the soft layer placed on top of hard infrastructure. MurphyEpson’s career suggests the opposite. The concrete may carry the bus. The pipe may carry the water. But a project also has to carry an explanation through a crowded room. Sometimes that explanation arrives with augmented reality. Sometimes it arrives with a slice of pepperoni.