Campaign Case Study Series · No. 01
Empowering a State’s
Charter School Movement
Through the Media
For more than twelve years, Sylvia Marketing & Public Relations served as the outsourced public relations agency for the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools. At the start, the coalition was barely heard of in the press and many of its schools were getting beaten up in print. By the end, the sector had learned to make its own news — and a letter from the White House sat in the file.
& Public Relations
Public Charter Schools
Campaign File No. 001 — the opening entry of the campaign series: more than a decade of statewide work, a sector taught to speak, and a press that finally had someone to call.
Ken Kilpatrick approached Dr. Timothy Daniels, the coalition’s early and most influential executive director — influential in the fundamental sense of making the organization effective and formidable. What he found matched what the clippings showed: a statewide coalition that was barely heard of in the press, and charter schools across the state that were not getting positive publicity. Many were getting beaten up.
The reason was structural, not stubborn. Charter founders emerged from classrooms and school districts with a vision for innovative learning — and then had to run the schools they built. Media relations was never part of the training. Many school leaders did not know how to invite the press to cover an event, and the movement had no central messaging for anyone to follow. They were great educators. It is entirely understandable that public relations was not their strength.
Dr. Daniels recommended that the PCPCS board bring Sylvia Marketing & PR on, and the board did. A series of discovery sessions followed, and out of those sessions came a strategic plan — not for one news cycle, but for a sector.
What silence costs a movement.
No central message
Every school told its own story or told none at all. Without a unified account of what charters were achieving, the public record filled with critics — unopposed.
Educators, not spokespeople
These were teachers and school builders, not press secretaries. Many had never been taught how to pitch a story, how to answer a hard question on the record, or how to invite a reporter to an event.
A hostile draft of the record
With the sector silent, the coverage wrote itself — and much of it was punitive. A reputation was being drafted by default, one story at a time, and nobody was drafting the rebuttal.
An existential ledger
Every few years, legislation surfaced that threatened to wipe out charter school funding. A sector that cannot reach the public cannot defend its budget — and every threatened dollar was a classroom’s dollar.
02 — The Strategic Challenge
A sector cannot defend what it never explains.
Charter schools are public schools: free to families, funded per pupil, with the tuition paid by each student’s home district. That one mechanic turned every funding bill into an existential question.
The arithmetic was unforgiving. A formula adjustment, a reimbursement fix, or a cap written in a Harrisburg committee room could reach into a school’s budget overnight. And when a bill moved, the story reaching the public was usually the districts’ story. The coalition existed to change both the math and the narrative — and neither mattered without the other.
The threats kept coming. Measures that would have stripped cyber charter schools of their independence and slashed their funding. Sweeping school-choice legislation that put every charter at the center of a Capitol firestorm. Funding overhauls aimed squarely at the state’s reimbursement to charters, and deduction schedules dressed as reform. Each one was a fight the coalition’s members had to understand — quickly, and in plain English.
“The objective was not one good story. The objective was an entire sector the press could not ignore.”
Winning that objective required more than releases and statements. It meant teaching hundreds of school leaders how the media actually works, building a message the whole sector could carry in one voice, arming parents to speak for their own schools in their own districts, and keeping every public word synchronized with the coalition’s lobbyist and lawyer. It meant building a communications operation where none existed — and running it statewide, year after year.
03 — The Approach
One plan. Every channel the state had.
The strategic plan that came out of discovery ran through every medium Pennsylvania had to offer — and it began on the road, in person, city by city.
Discovery & the Plan
A series of discovery sessions with Dr. Daniels mapped the sector’s strengths and its silence. The plan that followed assigned every audience its channel: editorial boards for the papers, airtime for the broadcast debate, plain language for members, and mobilization for parents.
The Roads We Drove
Ken and Dr. Daniels traveled the state together, sitting down with editorial boards and education writers face to face — in every venue, in the days before a video call could stand in for a handshake. The dailies that sat across the table are named below.
Teaching the Sector to Talk
School leaders learned how to generate media: how to pitch a story, how to invite the press to an event, how to stay on message under questioning. The coalition drafted talking points and produced explainer videos — tools the educators behind the movement had never been handed.
The Airwaves
Dr. Daniels appeared on the Pennsylvania Cable Network and on programs across the market — including the WFMZ debates on Business Matters, where he went toe-to-toe with state Representative Karen Beyer over cyber charter schools. Radio shows and television news followed.
The Business Case
The agency brought the Philadelphia Business Journal the numbers: charter schools are big business. Editor and health writer John George convened an education roundtable — Dr. Daniels at the table with voices from traditional district education, and the distinguished scholar of charter schools and public school choice, Dr. Robert Maranto, among the speakers.
Print & Coordination
Op-eds and point-counterpoints, press releases and fact sheets, fed steadily to the press — every public word drafted in sync with the coalition’s lobbyist and lawyer, so that advocacy and media moved as one operation.
The roads we drove — editorial boards and education writers, in person
No video call stood in for any of it. The work happened at the table: editorial board meetings and writer sit-downs, city by city, repeated across a decade — the unglamorous mileage that turned a movement nobody covered into a movement nobody could ignore.
Cable Network
Business Matters
Broadcast was one front of many: radio shows across the state’s media market and television news carried the same message — because everyone in the movement was finally on it.
04 — The Long Game
Doors opened. And stayed open.
The tactics filled a decade. Two of them — the newsletter and the grassroots machine — became the campaign’s enduring engine.
The Open Door
The newsletter began as a weekly digest sent from Dr. Daniels’ desk: plain-English updates on what each bill would do, what the coalition was doing about it, and what members could do to help.
When legislation surfaced that threatened to wipe out charter school funding, a board member argued the newsletter should stay reserved for paying members. Ken Kilpatrick thought the argument was exactly backwards. As long as the whole movement was on message — mobilizing parents, lobbying legislators, and sharing how charter schools were serving students in ways their districts could not or would not — the coalition only got stronger. The newsletter was how members saw that value for themselves.
So the doors came open — and stayed open. In time, as Mailchimp made distribution effortless, subscription was thrown wide: anyone could sign up through the website, opponents included. A newsletter built to recruit had become a newsletter built to persuade, and the argument that opened it outlasted everyone who lost it.
Parents to Harrisburg
Working with the coalition’s lobbyist, its lawyer, active board members, and the schools themselves, the agency turned member families into advocates — bringing parents to Harrisburg for lobby days during Charter School Week each May, and later during School Choice Week each January.
Lobby days were coordinated around the bills being fought or promoted, so legislators heard from the parents their votes affected. Inside the coalition, regular conference calls kept members current in plain English and handed parents ready-made ways to talk to their own representatives.
And the campaigns were felt. In the fax-machine era, one weekend of coordinated parent faxes jammed legislative machines so thoroughly that legislators complained they had run out of paper and could not find the other faxes they were expecting. Dr. Daniels was delighted.
People don’t join because you send them an email — that’s just your foot in the door to show them the value the organization offers.Ken Kilpatrick — President, Sylvia Marketing & Public Relations
05 — The Outcome
The sector found its voice. The White House heard it.
Measured across the engagement, the campaign’s results compound: membership, media, and recognition at the highest level in American politics.
$1M+
ad equivalency
The value of coverage space and airtime earned for PCPCS and for schools acting on its behalf — publicity that would have cost more than a million dollars had it been purchased as advertising.
2×
membership in three years
With the agency’s help, Dr. Daniels substantially increased membership, doubling it within three years — and he was delighted the day the rolls crossed one hundred member schools.
6+
major dailies, engaged
Editorial boards and education writers from the Post-Gazette to the Inquirer to the Scranton Times — and a host of others across the state’s media market.
1
letter from the White House
President George W. Bush commended Pennsylvania’s charter schools for the money their students and families raised to help the survivors of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
The shift shows up everywhere the record can be read. School leaders who had never spoken to a reporter sat across from editorial boards. Parents who had never lobbied anyone filled the Capitol on lobby days. The business press covered charter schools as an economy rather than a controversy. And the coalition’s membership — the surest vote of confidence an association earns — doubled within three years.
The engagement’s most singular artifact traveled in the other direction — from Pennsylvania to Washington. In the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Pennsylvania’s charter schools raised money on their own initiative to help the survivors. Ken Kilpatrick was at the White House that day on other client business; he brought the effort to the President’s attention, and returned with a letter from President George W. Bush commending the schools for what they had raised. The movement that once could not get a call returned now had a letter carrying the presidential seal.
That is the aggregate shape of the campaign: not one story reversed, but a sector rewired — trained, messaged, mobilized, and heard. The press that once beat charter schools up now had a coalition to call, parents to quote, and numbers to print.
06 — The Playbook
What the campaign teaches. In three rules.
The first entry of the campaign series closes with its principles — the ones a dozen years of statewide work kept proving.
“A sector that can tell its own story stops being somebody else’s headline.”
Message before everything
No tactic outperforms a message nobody shares. One voice, plainly written and carried by every school and every parent, beat any amount of scattered publicity the sector could have bought.
Open doors beat guarded ones
The newsletter that went to everyone — opponents included — recruited more members than a members-only version ever did. Show the value first; the joiners follow.
Numbers make news
Charter schools are big business — and saying so with the numbers in hand is what brought the business press to the table. Reporters can resist an argument. They cannot resist arithmetic.
07 — The Client
The coalition behind the campaign. Named on the record.
The first entry in the Campaign Case Study Series is a named client from the start: the statewide association that spoke for Pennsylvania’s public charter schools — and now speaks, with this file, for a dozen years of proof.
Education Advocacy · Nonprofit Coalition
Advocating for Pennsylvania’s charter schools statewide — before legislators, regulators, and the press
The Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools is the statewide membership and advocacy organization for Pennsylvania’s public charter schools and the families they serve — representing the sector before legislators, regulators, and the press, and equipping school leaders and parents to make the case for charter education.
The campaign’s founding partnership ran through Dr. Timothy Daniels, the coalition’s early and most influential executive director — influential in the fundamental sense of making the organization effective and formidable — who recommended the engagement to the board and then carried the plan onto editorial boards, broadcast sets, and Capitol hallways across the state. The agency’s service to the coalition ran for more than twelve years.
I’ve watched a lot of organizations hire public relations. This was different. Sylvia Marketing didn’t just win us coverage — they taught an entire movement how the media works, and how to make it work for our students. When the press listens to you, everything else becomes possible.The late Dr. Timothy Daniels — longtime Executive Director, Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools
Sylvia Marketing & Public Relations — Campaigns & Associations
Your sector has a story. Who is telling it?
An association is a promise: many voices, one message. Sylvia Marketing & PR builds the machine that keeps that promise — the training, the messaging, the grassroots, and the press relationships that put a sector in the news for the right reasons. Bring us the movement you represent: we will teach it to make news.
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