Success stories.

In 2007, Shelby County government placed 4,500-acre Shelby Farms into the hands of a non-profit conservancy board with a mission to conserve and enhance the property as one of the great large parks in America. The Conservancy hired Hall Strategies in 2007-08 to develop a branding campaign for Shelby Farms and to engage the community – the park’s owner – to collect its best ideas as a guide for the world’s leading landscape architecture firms competing for the master-plan project.
 
Our work involved developing branding and messaging for Shelby Farms Park; public launch of the brand and outreach to stakeholder groups; and organizing more than a dozen public input meetings in the community, as well as on-line surveys, to collect input to shape the park’s future. The input was collected, organized and presented to the competing firms to shape their visions. The master plan finalists’ plans were presented to the public at the Central Library in the style of an art exhibit. A final master plan was approved in 2008. The Conservancy gained widespread recognition for its public input model and depth of public contribution to the final plan. Shelby Farms Park is on the Web at www.shelbyfarmspark.org.

In 2007, a coalition of public health advocates banded together with the Tennessee Restaurant Association and other major business organizations to form the Smoke-Free Tennessee Coalition and lead an effort to pass Tennessee's first tobacco policy that would protect the health of non-smoking employees.
 
Hall Strategies, a Nashville public relations firm, was hired to lead the pr and grassroots efforts that helped make what many thought was a preposterous proposition a reality in this top tobacco growing state. For the coalition, our firm developed a government relations and public affairs strategy that included hosting rallies in every major community in the state, crafting campaign message, developing the itsakiller.com website, supporting a massive letter writing campaign and signing on nearly every major newspaper in Tennessee to editorialize for our position. The bill became law on June 11, 2007.

United Regional Medical Center is an acute care, full-service community hospital in Manchester, Tennessee that needed a public relations campaign to demonstrate widespread community support for their Certificate of Need (CON) request for a much needed replacement hospital facility. Hall Strategies responded with the New Hospital Now campaign, mobilizing the community and communicating the importance of a modern health care facility to the economic growth and quality of life for Manchester.
 
Hall Strategies worked closely with hospital leadership to mobilize a grassroots base that was active and vocally supportive of the replacement hospital. The campaign garnered more than 5,000 signatures of support and New Hospital Now yard signs blanketed the community. Numerous community events were held, hospital leadership gave more than 50 speaking engagements and presentations to area community groups and radio talk shows. New Hospital Now full-page advertisements featuring various community members appeared in the weekly newspapers. Despite opposition from two other community hospitals, United Regional's CON was supported by both the city and county mayors through the course of the campaign. For the CON hearing, more than 100 community leaders came to lend their support and the CON was approved unanimously by the state oversight board on December 12, 2007.

We have worked with the Mayor's Office of Children and Youth since 2000 to organize the citywide celebrations that mark the beginning of the school year in Nashville.
 
The event annually draws more than 20,000 people to Nashville's Sommet Center, where parents and students are introduced to more than 100 organizations providing resources and support for public education. More than 300 volunteers are involved in staging the event, which includes educational activities and entertainment on four stages. The initiative remains a grassroots model for celebrating education, bringing together parents, educators and the private sector to make a difference in educating children.

For this Memphis-based non-profit organization, Hall Strategies provides public relations and policy support for a collaborative initiative involving business, government, health care, childcare and education to improve the environment for children in Shelby County ages 0-5.
 
Hall Strategies helped extend the 'First Years Last a Lifetime' public campaign, formed strategic partnerships, created special events, and generated new initiatives to deliver effective early care and education for parents and caregivers and the children they care for.

TEP is the premier private sector economic development organization in Tennessee, working closely with the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development to market Tennessee for corporate expansion and relocation.  Hall Strategies leads strategic planning and marketing activities that showcase the best of Tennessee to the economic development community’s top site consultants and to the hottest relocation and expansion prospects.