The most revealing thing about Strategic Elements is a broken wheelchair. For a person who depends on one, a wheelchair is not luggage. It is mobility, fit, independence and, often, a custom-built extension of the body. Yet air travel can reduce it to an item at the bottom of a cargo hold. Chairs are damaged. Transfers are painful. Restrooms are inaccessible. The problem is intimate, but the machinery that might fix it is institutional: airlines, regulators, congressional committees, an enormous federal bill.
That distance - between a private indignity and a public decision - is where this West Des Moines firm works. In 2023, Strategic Elements partnered with the Muscular Dystrophy Association to document air travel with disability advocates Mindy Henderson and Madison Lawson. The team captured what a policy memo cannot: the wait, the handling, the uncertainty and the practiced composure required to get through a routine flight.
Then it treated the footage as campaign infrastructure. The videos connected to MDA's Hill Day, continued through Muscular Dystrophy Awareness Month and circulated while Congress considered FAA reauthorization. One companion video passed two million views. MDA says advocates sent more than 10,600 messages to lawmakers by May 2024. TSA used campaign material in employee training resources. The FAA reauthorization that passed that month included accessibility measures championed by MDA.
“The videos were raw, honest, and compelling, bringing Mindy and Madison's experiences to life.”Mark Fisher · MDA Director of Advocacy Engagement
The product is the sequence
Strategic Elements calls itself a full-service public-affairs firm, a description broad enough to disappear into. Its menu includes coalition building, government affairs, crisis communications, speechwriting, earned media, social listening, creative production, advertising, events and campaign management. The more useful distinction is how the pieces are arranged.
The firm's people talk like campaign operatives because many of them were. Co-founder and CEO Christine Stineman managed national field advocacy and began building digital public-affairs teams in 2008. Co-founder and chief strategist John Stineman ran a presidential caucus campaign and later national field work for large corporations. The current roster mixes political hands with journalists, digital strategists, creatives and former military officers.
This explains the company's favorite nouns: audiences, messengers, stakeholders, allies. A conventional agency can think first about the artifact - the release, ad or event. Strategic Elements starts with the human map around a decision. The artifact is selected later.
Views are the opening bid
A campaign for Clean Grid Alliance makes the sequence visible in numbers. First came short videos tailored around job creation, family impact and power-grid reliability. They earned more than 560,000 views. Many reports would stop there, polish the impression count and call it awareness.
Strategic Elements retargeted people who watched with regional resources. In 30 days, the campaign recorded more than 400 PDF downloads and 730 website clicks. Then it used that informed audience for a follower campaign, adding 670 Facebook engagements and increasing followers by 250 percent. The ladder went from borrowed attention to deeper knowledge to an audience Clean Grid Alliance could reach again.
The bars are indexed, not drawn to a shared scale; views, downloads and follower growth are different units. That is precisely the point. A competent campaign does not pretend every metric means the same thing. It asks whether each stage did its particular job.
A company built outside the capital
Christine and John founded Strategic Elements in 2009. Both came from Spirit Lake, Iowa. The headquarters remained in West Des Moines while the firm spread staff across Washington, California, Florida, Texas, South Dakota, Arizona and Georgia. It says its work has reached all 50 states.
The geography gives the positioning some bite. Public affairs is often sold as proximity to Washington. Strategic Elements sells proximity to Washington and to everywhere else: the state legislator, local employer, community advocate, trade group, farm audience or persuadable voter whose support gives a policy argument weight. Its clients include corporations, associations, nonprofits, clean-energy groups and public offices. The firm is a certified woman-owned small business, competing with giant agency networks on one side and narrow political specialists on the other.
An Iowa clean-energy luncheon shows what that local layer looks like in practice. Working with American Clean Power and Power Up Iowa, the firm put Republican officials, utility executives, agriculture leaders and economic-development figures in the same room. It recommended award recipients, built the guest list, handled the venue and security, prepared remarks, staffed media interviews and gave attendees a social press kit tuned to their different constituencies. Roughly 110 people attended. Fourteen member companies participated. Twelve videos came out of the day. The event was not decoration around the campaign; it was a factory for relationships, public commitments and reusable material.
Its business model is bespoke professional service, not software or a packaged media product. Clients buy strategy and execution through projects or ongoing relationships. There is no public rate card because there is no standard unit of work: a crisis plan, national coalition and connected-TV campaign are different creatures.
The part worth copying
- Name the decision you need to influence before choosing a channel.
- Map the people around that decision, including the voices they already trust.
- Use firsthand evidence to make an abstract issue concrete.
- Give every burst of attention a next step: learn, sign, meet, share or return.
- Measure each stage by its own job, not by one flattering number.
The constraint is credibility
This model is powerful when three conditions coexist: a real decision window, credible people willing to carry the message and an organization able to follow attention with action. Remove one and the chain weakens. Targeting cannot manufacture trust. A moving story without a policy ask can become merely moving. A coalition assembled after the key vote is a mailing list with unfortunate timing.
That is why the broken wheelchair matters. It is not a metaphor dreamed up in a brainstorm. It is an object with a person attached, a failure with consequences and a policy route toward repair. Strategic Elements' best work begins by respecting that specificity. The cleverness comes later - in choosing who needs to see it, what they can do next and how a moment becomes a movement without losing the person who made anyone care.