Strategic Communication for Non-Profit Organizations
As the Communications Director for Opportunity For All Floridians and Floridians for Honesting Lending, Christopher was responsible for strategic communications at a number of levels.
Press Engagement
I was responsible for strategically engaging with press, generating interest from reporters, writing, pitching and placing Op-Eds in influential Florida news outlets, and finding stories of everyday Floridians who were interested in sharing their stories with the media.
Here is a sampling of some of my press engagement work:
There was a whopping 54% voter participation in the Village of Pinecrest’s off-year local special election. Vote-by-mail made the difference, says the vice mayor of this South Florida town.
Florida’s vote-by-mail system is a critical piece of the state’s free and fair elections, enabling millions of Floridians to participate in the democratic process. Access to vote-by-mail is particularly important for voters with disabilities, the majority of whom vote by mail due to transportation and other access barriers. However, recent changes to the vote-by-mail request system proposed by Secretary of State, Cord Byrd, could create significant barriers for people with disabilities, limiting their access to the ballot box, and making Florida’s elections less fair and less free.
I wrote this press release as communications director for Floridians for Honest Lending. It urged a consumer-focused approach to property insurance relief and promoted a series of videos we produced with FAIR. It resulted in an article in Florida Politics entitled: "Consumer advocates push accountability for bad actors, assistance for homeowners ahead of Special Session"
Today, as the Florida Legislature is set to meet this week for a special session regarding property insurance, the consumer lending watchdog group Floridians For Honest Lending and the insurance reform group Federal Association For Insurance Reform (FAIR) released an educational video about short-term and long-term solutions to fix Florida’s broken property insurance market. The video is part of a series about the increased risk of foreclosures if the Legislature fails to provide stability to Florida’s property insurance marketplace.
Rep. Joy Goff-Marcil argues in this opinion piece that if DeSantis can figure out how to send out more than $600 million in corporate welfare in a timely manner, then he should be able to figure out how to distribute the same amount in federal aid to real people in this state who actually need help.
Sen. Ileana Garcia and Rep. Juan Fernandez-Barquin held a news conference in the Capitol on Monday to unveil legislation designed to protect Floridians from predatory foreclosure practices.
On Monday, January 31st, State Senator Ileana Garcia (SD 37) and State Rep. Juan Fernandez-Barquin (HD 119) will hold an event in the Capitol with affected homeowners and fair lending advocates, announcing new legislation designed to protect Floridians from predatory foreclosure practices from lenders and banks.
Opportunity For All Floridians sent this press release to news outlets in the Orlando area, after conducting a series of interviews with everyday Floridians who were struggling to make ends meet because they couldn’t get the state’s unemployment system to pay them the benefits they were owed. This press outreach resulted in several local news stories.
Video Production
For Opportunity For All Floridians, and Floridians For Honest Lending, I have used my background in video production to further the goals of the organizations in a number of ways.
We have interviewed dozens of everyday Floridians from around the state to help amplify their stories, especially when there is a gap in news coverage. We use these interviews to help transform abstract policy discussions into stories about real people with real faces and real struggles.
🚨 BREAKING: SB 620, the Puppy Mill Loophole Law, has now been sent to Governor Ron DeSantis. He has vetoed bad bills before, and he has the chance to veto this cruel bill. New reports suggest Gov. DeSantis was concerned that this bill would give the owners of puppy mills almost unlimited power to operate anywhere in Florida. Now he must decide whether to veto this cruel bill. Add your name and tell Gov. DeSantis: No more puppy mills! Veto SB 620. #NoPuppyMills #Veto620
This morning, Floridians For Honest Lending released a series of videos with our partners at FAIR, the Federal Association For Insurance Reform, to educate the public about the property insurance crisis and to call for a consumer-focused approach to stabilizing the property insurance market in Florida.
I wrote this press release as communications director for Floridians for Honest Lending. It urged a consumer-focused approach to property insurance relief and promoted a series of videos we produced with FAIR. It resulted in an article in Florida Politics entitled: "Consumer advocates push accountability for bad actors, assistance for homeowners ahead of Special Session"
🇺🇸 🗳 ALERT: The Florida Legislature has just passed passed SB 524, the Anti-Voter Freedom Act. This widely criticized legislation creates a new "office of elections crimes" (the first of its kind in the nation), and diminishes the freedom to vote in Florida by adding new and confusing hurdles to voting by mail — a form of voting that many Floridians use, especially seniors and members of the military serving overseas.
🚨 Florida's local minimum wage laws are at risk. State lawmakers are pushing a bill which would repeal local minimum wage laws across the state. Take action: click and add your name to tell your state representatives and senators hands off our local living wage laws.
I shot and edited several interviews with victims of foreclosure fraud in Florida as part of our work with Floridians for Honest Lending. These stories were included in our push to pass a Florida Homeowner Bill of Rights.
25% of working Floridians are uninsured and the number is still growing.
Digital Advocacy Campaigns
At Opportunity For All Floridians (OFAF) and Floridians For Honest Lending (FHL), I communicated with our audiences via email, via text, and via social media to encourage them to engage with their elected officials on issues that matter.
Through digital ad campaigns and organic word-of-mouth, I grew the OFAF email list by 260% over two years to a list of over 40,000, and started the FHL email list from scratch to a list of over 4,000 now.
Results: our veto campaigns helped kill two regressive bills
Our digital advocacy work was instrumental in sending more than 10,000 messages urging Gov. DeSantis to veto a harmful preemption bill that would have had an immediate chilling effect on progressive county and municipal level lawmaking. We were also part of a coalition of environmental and energy groups that urged the governor to veto a bill that would have gutted Florida’s net metering bill, and would have damaged Florida’s rooftop solar industry. The governor vetoed both bills in July of 2022.
Here are some examples of the advocacy campaigns I designed and executed — and their results.
Opportunity For All Floridians sent out this text message alert to our audience around Florida, alerting them to a proposed double digit property insurance rate increase from the state-backed Citizens Property Insurance Corporation. This produced hundreds of emails to the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation.
Opportunity For All Floridians sent this text message out to over 4,000 subscriber cell phones across the state of Florida in advance of Early Voting for the August 2024 primary.
Opportunity For All Floridians sent this text message to over 1,500 subscribers who had expressed an interest in economic and lending issues after the Florida Legislature passed a predatory lending bill in 2024.
Opportunity for All Floridians sent this text message to our audience after the Florida House passed a law rolling back decades of Florida’s child labor protections. Our research suggested that many everyday Floridians did not believe that the legislature would do something like this, so we opened our messaging by saying, “YES, THIS IS REAL.” This text asked readers to reach out to the Florida Senate to ask them not to pass the final bill. Unfortunately, the bill did pass and was signed into law on March 22, 2024.
When the Brevard County commission threatened to slash the budget of the Brevard Supervisor of Elections, and cut their budget for sample ballot and prepaid postage on Vote-by-Mail ballots, we worked with our partners at All Voting is Local to alert all of our audience members in Brevard County and urge them to speak out. This text was sent to 240 mobile subscribers in Brevard County with easy-to-take steps to call their county commissioners. Thanks to this advocacy, the Brevard County Commission unanimously voted to save prepaid postage and sample ballots at their September 19 meeting.
Miami-Dade County's urban development boundary has served as a line to protect fragile ecosystems, farmland and water outside of Miami-Dade County's urban core. Simultaneously, it has served as a catalyst to spur smart growth, smart development, better mass transit, and more investment in jobs and affordable housing in Miami's urban core.
On September 2, Florida's largest electric utility monopolies, FPL, Duke Energy and Tampa Electric, filed petitions with the Florida Public Service Commission to increase electric rates in 2023. If the Public Service Commission approves these rates, your electric bill could go up — in some cases by as much as 15% per month.
If the Florida Public Service Commission approves the request from Florida’s largest utilities, your monthly electric bill could be going up by as much as 15%.
On Friday, June 24, Governor Ron DeSantis vetoed SB 620, formally named the Local Business Protection Act, but which critics dubbed the “Ending Local Freedoms Act.”
🚨 BREAKING: SB 620, the Puppy Mill Loophole Law, has now been sent to Governor Ron DeSantis. He has vetoed bad bills before, and he has the chance to veto this cruel bill. New reports suggest Gov. DeSantis was concerned that this bill would give the owners of puppy mills almost unlimited power to operate anywhere in Florida. Now he must decide whether to veto this cruel bill. Add your name and tell Gov. DeSantis: No more puppy mills! Veto SB 620. #NoPuppyMills #Veto620
Can you write an email to Gov. DeSantis to veto this cruel new law? Gov. DeSantis has stood up to his own legislature and vetoed bad bills this year, and he is seriously considering a veto on this one. He needs to hear from all of us now.
Thanks to you, we delivered a petition with over 1,300 signatures to Governor DeSantis asking him to veto SB 620, the Puppy Mill Law.
🐶Text 'PUPPY' to add your name. Thank you! - Opportunity For All Floridians
🖊️ Can you write Gov. DeSantis and tell him to veto HB 741? We should encourage energy independence, and we can’t afford MORE rate hikes. Click here to write him in just a couple of clicks:
🇺🇸 🗳 ALERT: The Florida Legislature has just passed passed SB 524, the Anti-Voter Freedom Act. This widely criticized legislation creates a new "office of elections crimes" (the first of its kind in the nation), and diminishes the freedom to vote in Florida by adding new and confusing hurdles to voting by mail — a form of voting that many Floridians use, especially seniors and members of the military serving overseas.