There is a particular kind of sentence that only gets written after everyone in a company has already accepted it as fact. In February 2026, John Stanford, the chief executive of the Washington firm then called Prism Group, supplied one: “The bright lines between GR, PR, strategic comms and corporate strategy no longer exist.” It sounded like a diagnosis. It was also the reason for a new name.
Prism Group became Novel Strategies. No client changed. Senior leadership stayed put. The assignment was not to invent a new business but to put an accurate label on the one that had quietly appeared. The firm had started in 2012 and built a conventional Washington credential: government relations, congressional work, coalition building and issue advocacy. But the requests arriving from clients were no longer conventional. A policy problem wanted research. Research wanted a message. The message wanted a coalition, an op-ed, a website and paid media. Soon the supposedly separate jobs had become one long job with too many handoffs.
Novel's answer is to own the handoffs. Its three public service lines are Strategy & Policy, Public Affairs & Communication, and Digital & Engagement. Beneath those neat labels sits a busy inventory: legislative strategy, research, advocacy planning, brand identity, media relations, thought leadership, polling, content, paid media, design and web development. The customer is not buying access alone. The customer is buying agreement among the people who advise what to say, whom to say it to and what should happen next.
Those figures describe registered federal lobbying activity aggregated from public disclosures. They do not include every communications or advisory engagement, and they are not the firm's total revenue.
The first thing to fail was the category
Rebrands usually arrive wearing the costume of reinvention. This one is more revealing because Novel says it did not change direction. The old description failed before the business did. “Lobbying firm” was too narrow for a team with an in-house creative director, public-affairs operators, policy specialists and people running campaigns across several channels. “PR firm” missed the legislative work. “Consultancy” was accurate in the least useful way, like calling a restaurant a food building.
What changed Stanford and partner Ed Stewart's minds was accumulation: more capacity, more capabilities and a team that had reached 20 people by the relaunch. Novel took an entire floor on Pennsylvania Avenue and announced an always-on hiring portal. The move was physical evidence of the organizational bet. One office, one team and, ideally, one account of the problem.
“This isn't about a change in direction. It's about making sure our name reflects the team we've built and the way we work together.”Ed Stewart · Partner and COO
The product is coordination
Imagine a life-sciences company watching a bill gather momentum. A conventional sequence might look like this: the government-relations shop explains the legislative threat; an executive team chooses a position; a communications agency translates that position; a pollster tests it; a creative shop turns it into material; a media buyer distributes it. Every transfer costs time, loses context and creates a small opportunity for contradiction.
Novel compresses that sequence. Its public client description ranges from corporate executives and trade associations to nonprofits, entrepreneurs, investors and sovereign governments. The sectors are those where regulatory language and commercial consequence regularly collide: life sciences, technology, energy production and financial services. Its disclosed lobbying roster makes the abstraction concrete. It has included Gusto, Schneider Electric USA, U.S. Black Chambers, the Association of Women's Business Centers, Incubate and the International Pizza Hut Franchise Holders Association. This is less a single industry specialty than a specialty in organizations that must explain themselves to power.
The bipartisan positioning matters here. Stanford's work has included Democratic engagement at the federal level; Stewart's background includes Republican campaigns, international elections, trade agreements and work in more than 25 countries. Their complementary networks are part of the product. So is the firm's membership in United Government Affairs, a network of independent agencies in Washington and seven European capitals. A 20-person shop cannot maintain a native office everywhere. It can maintain trusted collaborators.
What does the work cost?
Novel does not sell a public menu of packages. Federal disclosure forms provide the clearest, narrowest window into the economics. Several second-quarter 2026 lobbying engagements were reported at $10,000, $20,000 or $30,000 for the quarter. Genevant Sciences and Gusto were each listed at $30,000; the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives at $20,000; the National Small Business Association at $10,000. These amounts are reporting figures for registered lobbying, rounded under disclosure rules. They are neither quotations nor an invoice for the entire integrated service.
Selected Q2 2026 reported lobbying income
Communications, design, polling and corporate advisory work may sit outside these figures.
That distinction is the business model. Public affairs firms earn fees for judgment, labor, relationships and execution, generally through tailored retainers or projects. The lobbying number is the visible slice because law requires its disclosure. The website, messaging and executive counsel can be real work without becoming a line in the federal database.
Two experiments beside the firm
The rebrand also introduced Novel Concept, described as a modern think tank for policymaker education, and the Novel Strategies Foundation, a 501(c)(3) intended to help advocacy efforts that lack Washington access and experience. They extend the same thesis in different directions. The commercial firm advises organizations that can hire it. The foundation proposes to help some that cannot. The think tank aims to educate the policymaker before a particular client request is even on the table.
Those initiatives are early, so the interesting question is structural rather than celebratory: can Novel keep education, charitable support and paid representation distinct enough to preserve trust, while close enough to share useful expertise? In public affairs, adjacency can create leverage and scrutiny at the same time. Clear governance and transparent boundaries will matter as much as clever programming.
The part worth copying
The most portable idea here is not “add more services.” Plenty of agencies create a longer capabilities page and call it integration. The useful move is to follow a client's problem across departmental borders, then redesign the team around the points where context gets lost.
Map the handoffs.
Find every moment a brief moves between policy, leadership, communications and distribution. That is where speed and meaning leak out.
Integrate around an outcome.
A shared client objective is useful. A grab bag of unrelated services is merely a bigger brochure.
Let the brand lag the proof.
Novel changed the name after building the team. That sequence made the announcement credible.
The approach has limits. A client with a narrow, commoditized assignment may not benefit from a multidisciplinary team. An organization that wants its lobbyist, pollster and creative agency deliberately separated for independence or procurement reasons may prefer several specialists. Global work still depends on partner quality outside Washington. And integration only helps when the integrated people disagree honestly; coordination that merely produces consensus faster can make a bad idea travel farther.
Novel Strategies is therefore less a revolution than a sharp observation about modern influence. Policy is argued in committee rooms, but also in headlines, board decks, search results, coalition letters and thirty-second clips. The organization that connects those places has an advantage. Prism Group spent years assembling that connection. The new name is the receipt.