The first headquarters of Publicity For Good was not in Nashville. It had no conference room, no receptionist and, depending on the campground, no reliable Wi-Fi. It was a 23-foot Airstream occupied by a publicist named Heather Holmes, her husband Austin, and a communications firm that was learning to behave like software: distributed, documented and always on.
The detail is easy to treat as founder-story garnish. Silver trailer. Open road. Laptop by the window. But the size of the room mattered. It forced decisions. A colleague could not simply lean over a partition. A client could not be reassured by a handsome lobby. Work had to travel through calendars, calls, checklists, pitches and visible results. Years before remote work became compulsory, the company had accidentally built for it.
Holmes founded the agency in 2016 after beginning her PR career in 2012. Her premise was narrower than “we tell stories.” Publicity For Good would represent brands and leaders with a stated social or environmental purpose, especially in consumer goods, health, wellness and food. The agency now also serves nonprofits, professional firms, fintech companies and thought leaders. Its headquarters is Nashville; its labor map is much larger. The company describes more than 60 specialists spread across seven countries.
The day “optional” became expensive
Then came March 2020, and the drawback of selling publicity became plain. When frightened companies sort expenses, PR can drift into the “later” column. Holmes said the agency's revenue fell by half in a single day. This was the first thing to fail: not the remote system, but demand itself. Clients were afraid to buy what looked discretionary.
What changed the founders' minds was survival. Communication could not remain an airy promise about awareness; it had to look like an operating plan. The already-virtual team knew how to work without a room. By the end of the year, Holmes said, the business had doubled, approached 30 people and crossed $1 million in annual revenue for the first time.
That sequence explains today's Publicity For Good better than the Airstream alone. It is a service company trying to make an unpredictable craft feel countable. The current website offers four ascending packages. Each names actual work: press releases, article placements, podcast bookings, media opportunities, reporting, strategy calls and crisis support. The top tier promises unlimited placements and podcasts, while every tier includes a dedicated strategist and what the firm calls LLM reputation management.
The intriguing product is not a press hit. It is the removal of mystery from the weeks before the press hit.
A factory for borrowed credibility
Publicity For Good's customers usually have a credibility gap. A coconut-oil company may have a supply-chain mission but little national recognition. A veterans' law practice may possess expertise but no obvious route onto television. A founder may be articulate in meetings and invisible everywhere else. Paid advertising lets each of them make claims. Earned media asks an outside party to decide the claim is worth repeating.
The agency's work follows a simple ladder. First, it audits the brand, competitors and media landscape. Next, it turns evidence into a pitchable story - a founder experience, a useful data point, a timely opinion, a launch, a cause. Then specialists pitch journalists, producers, podcasts and event organizers. Finally, the placement is reported and reused. A television appearance can become sales proof, a sequence of social posts, a retailer's reassurance, an investor update and, crucially, a reason for the next producer to answer.
Find the tension
Audit the category, the competitors and the claim that can survive an editor's skepticism.
Package the proof
Build the pitch, press material, spokesperson and timing around something specific enough to repeat.
Create the ripple
Turn a credible appearance into social material, sales evidence and momentum for the next opportunity.
This is why the firm's menu has expanded beyond classic media relations. It manages social accounts and influencers, pursues awards, arranges podcast tours and speaking dates, and handles crises. In 2026 it also advertises reputation work for large language models: competitor analysis, keyword strategy, content and media placements meant to make a brand more likely to appear in AI-generated answers. The language is new. The mechanism - accumulating third-party evidence - is familiar.
Those are company-reported totals, not audited accounts. Still, they reveal how Publicity For Good wants to be judged: volume, recurrence and downstream action. Its own case snapshots claim 47 placements in six months for a wellness brand, 12 top-tier placements plus eight keynote bookings for a fintech leader, and a 300 percent increase in organic inbound leads for a nonprofit. Verified directory reviews add texture. Clients describe local television bookings, Forbes and Business Insider features, a weekly radio show, hundreds of influencer pitches and coaching on how to exploit the coverage after it arrives.
The price of making noise useful
Publicity For Good does not post package prices. The Manifest lists its minimum project size at $5,000 or more; actual retainers depend on scope. That makes the economic test straightforward. A brand should not ask whether four article placements sound exciting. It should ask what credible coverage can unlock: a retailer conversation, a lower-friction sale, a speaking fee, better recruiting, stronger search results or a funder's attention.
The model differs from a traditional generalist agency in two ways. First, the mission filter narrows the client pool and supplies a recurring editorial lens. Second, the packages expose deliverables that many retainers leave fuzzy. It differs from PR software at the opposite end: people still develop the angle, coach the spokesperson, maintain relationships and make judgment calls. Competitors include global purpose practices, consumer agencies, boutique publicists, in-house teams and founders doing their own outreach.
The useful warning sits inside the model. Publicity cannot manufacture durable interest from an empty claim. It becomes a poor fit when a company has no evidence behind its purpose, nobody available to speak quickly, no patience for repeated pitching, or an expectation that earned coverage will behave like a paid ad. The agency can increase the surface area of luck. It cannot order a newsroom to care.
Purpose is not the story. Purpose plus proof, conflict, timing and a human being who will answer the phone - that can become a story.
What a founder can borrow
The copyable lesson is not to buy an Airstream. Start locally, as Holmes often advises. Write down the three claims your competitors repeat and locate the one piece of evidence they cannot copy. Build a short list of journalists and podcasts whose audiences genuinely need that evidence. Offer one useful angle at a time. When coverage arrives, do not frame it and forget it. Extract the quote, send it to customers, equip sales, update the founder bio, add it to retailer materials and use it to make the next pitch warmer.
Most of all, report the work. A weekly decision memo and a monthly placement ledger sound less romantic than “brand storytelling,” but romance is hard to renew on a retainer. Publicity For Good's most interesting achievement is turning a craft built on taste and relationships into something a founder can inspect.
The Airstream eventually stopped being headquarters. The habit it created did not. Publicity For Good now occupies the curious position of an agency that sells attention while organizing itself around constraints: a defined mission, a distributed team, a fixed cadence and a scoreboard. In public relations, where the final decision always belongs to someone outside the building, controlling the process may be the closest thing to controlling the result.