The Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation

CDRF partnered with the University of New Mexico to determine – for the first time ever – how many people in the United States were living with spinal cord injury. There was a large group of stakeholders – including but not limited to a coalition of groups that work on paralysis and related issues. In addition, the findings were not “packaged” in the way medical announcements are: this was not in a peer-reviewed journal, nor were the results provided in a way easily consumed by the media.

Turner created a report showcasing the findings and devised a stakeholder briefing strategy. We put five top health/medical publicists on setting up media briefings and promoting a release press event. We addressed questions about the data through one-on-one embargoed briefings with the UNM academics. The first-ever data achieved virtually saturation media coverage – all the morning shows, all the evening shows, not only all the national newspapers but also most of the regional ones, the radio networks. We even got story placement as far away as Tehran and Beijing.

Climate Advisers

The climate change think tank Climate Advisers brought Turner on to help manage a massive multi-media event in San Francisco – the Global Climate Action Summit. The charge was to fill the area of the city where this climate change conference was taking place with countless images of trees to underscore understanding that forests are our best protection against climate change. While conference attendees were in town we wanted images of trees to constantly be in their vision, whether in front of them or on their phones or anywhere they might look.

Our inspiration for this work was a combination of Ents from Lord of the Rings and the creatures descending on the wall from the North in Game of Thrones. We partnered a California-based circus and the woman who created Groot for Guardians of the Galaxy to create stilt walkers costumed as trees. The trees were everywhere during the summit. A London-based advertising ageny created an Instagram campaign in which the leading fashion photographers in 35 countries posted images of the country’s iconic trees.

We also worked with a coalition of thirty environmental groups whose principals carried the forest message in their speeches at the event – including celebrities Harrison Ford, Alec Baldwin and Jane Goodall.

The stilt walking trees were in all the coverage of the event, riding just under the headline of papers from the New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle.

All of this work was amplified by robust earned and paid social media outreach. One of our data specialists politely informed us that we “broke the internet” not only in San Francisco but internationally with images of the human trees.