The Vocabulary Test: How The Wakeman Agency Turns Words Into Infrastructure

Imagine a 200-year-old company with 19,000 employees and a vocabulary problem. Its leaders believe they are speaking clearly about race and equity. Its employees hear avoidance. The company has guidelines, intentions and a communications department, yet the difficult words keep disappearing at the precise moment they are needed. This is the sort of problem The Wakeman Agency likes: not a shortage of messages, but a gap between what an institution thinks it says and what people actually experience.

The agency audited the organization’s language, interviewed stakeholders, examined internal and external material and located the evasions hiding inside familiar prose. Then it built a lexicon - terms to use, terms to retire, reasons for each change and protocols for keeping the document alive. Training followed. The deliverable was not a prettier statement. It was a way for thousands of people to make harder decisions with a shared vocabulary.

That case explains the unusual corner of the communications market occupied by Vanessa Wakeman’s firm. Founded in 2003 as a public-relations agency for nonprofits, the White Plains company now works across strategic advisory, earned media, research, crisis preparation, events and thought leadership. Its clients include foundations, global nonprofits and socially responsible companies. The common denominator is not sector or size. It is consequence: these are organizations whose words touch public health, civil rights, education, climate, economic mobility and other subjects where a careless frame can do harm.

Publicity is the visible part

Most people understand public relations through its receipts: the television segment, the newspaper story, the quotation in a national magazine. Wakeman can produce those receipts. For United Way of New York City, its campaign around the True Cost of Living report generated more than 35 prominent press hits in 30 days, including television, radio, business and national-news outlets. The campaign also aimed locally, toward Bronx and Brooklyn audiences who could use the programs being discussed.

But the more revealing work happened before and around the coverage. The agency built messages for a new CEO, trained leaders, interpreted the organization’s many programs and joined media relations to fundraising and positioning. A press hit was not treated as the finish line. It was one moving part in an institutional voice.

ChemoCars offers the cleanest demonstration. In 2017, the young Charlotte nonprofit provided free rides to cancer treatment and wanted to expand. Wakeman recognized that founder Zachary Bolster’s decision to leave finance after his mother died of cancer was the emotional doorway. The agency developed messages, coached him for interviews and sorted a flood of media opportunities by value. Coverage reached CBS and other national outlets. Rides rose 20 percent in two months, prospective partners called, and the organization moved from one city to two in less than a year.

The product is a better question

Wakeman calls the foundation of its work Narrative Justice. The phrase could easily float away into consultancy fog, but the firm pins it to five commitments: awareness, engagement, confrontation, incorporation and sharing. In ordinary language: understand the history around a story; involve the people living it; inspect the institution’s own habits; change the work; then distribute narrative power.

The distinction matters because social-change communications often contain a peculiar contradiction. An organization may exist to serve a community while still presenting itself as the hero of that community’s story. Funders have resources; staff have professional language; the people closest to the problem become case studies. Wakeman’s method reverses the order of expertise. It asks how affected people describe the problem, whether they are compensated for their participation, and whether their account can change the organization’s theory of change - not merely decorate it.

This is also why its work looks more like organizational design than copywriting. The Lexicon Project uses audits, focus groups, interviews, influence mapping and competitor analysis. Its crisis practice builds risk registers that map narrative weak points, audience perceptions and likely triggers before an emergency. Its Innovation Lab adds foresight, behavioral research and experimentation. The thing being sold is judgment, made portable through plans, glossaries, playbooks and trained people.

When louder is not safer

The firm’s recent idea of a “quiet campaign” shows how far it has traveled from publicity for publicity’s sake. A foundation working across a hostile political environment wanted to continue equity work without exposing grantee partners to unnecessary risk. The obvious options - issue a bold statement or remove the language - were both too crude. Wakeman studied the ecosystem, leadership’s appetite for risk and the trust between the foundation and its partners. It then moved the campaign into private meetings, invite-only roundtables, direct conversations and coordinated work with peers.

This is communications by subtraction. It recognizes that visibility can create danger as well as influence, particularly when grassroots organizations become targets. The decision is not silence. It is choosing the room, the audience and the sequence with more care. That may be Wakeman’s sharpest competitive distinction: it is willing to recommend less public relations when less public relations serves the mission.

What survived the pivot

There is a useful origin story inside the Narrative Justice Project. Wakeman conceived the initiative after seeing that missing Black and Latinx girls received little mainstream coverage. The original plan called for free media training in 20 cities. Then COVID-19 arrived and the in-person launch collapsed. The agency moved the 75-minute sessions online, expanding access beyond the geography it had planned. With support from the University of Florida’s Consortium on Trust in Media and Technology, the project paired training with research into how communities of color are represented.

What changed Wakeman’s mind was not a branding workshop. It was constraint. The venue disappeared, so the delivery model changed; the underlying purpose did not. The same pattern appears in its client work. A YWCA had fewer than four months to rebuild a major luncheon that normally required a year. Wakeman reworked project management, donor cultivation, board behavior and event messaging. The luncheon exceeded its fundraising goal by 15 percent, and the organization kept using the model.

A consultancy with conditions

None of this is a magic vocabulary list. The legacy-company case worked because leadership allowed uncomfortable evidence into the room, staff participated and procedures were created for updating the lexicon. The END Fund’s project drew on perspectives across a globally distributed organization and examined the colonial history embedded in philanthropic language. The method depends on access, time and a client willing to discover that its self-image is incomplete.

That condition is worth stating because it defines the market. An organization seeking a slogan without inquiry, instant consensus without confrontation, or a one-off campaign without internal ownership will get little from this approach. Wakeman’s small-team model - a core staff supported by researchers, subject experts and creative partners - is built for bespoke engagements, not mass production. Public pricing is not posted, and the work is sold as advisory and project services rather than software.

The agency’s wager is that communications belongs closer to strategy than promotion. Words influence who is believed, what receives money, which risks are noticed and how a public problem is understood. Treat them as decoration and they peel. Treat them as infrastructure and you have to inspect the beams.

After 23 years, The Wakeman Agency remains a compact company in a crowded field. Its advantage is not volume. It is the insistence that the first draft of a story is also a map of power - and that editing the draft may require changing more than the sentence.