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Marijean

Marijean Oldham (Jaggers), a social media specialist and public relations professional, is president and CEO of Jaggers Communications LLC, a strategic communications firm based in Charlottesville, Va.

Apr 05
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What Is PR, Really? How Ethical Public Relations Actually Grows Your Business

By Public Relations

Public relations has a reputation problem.

When most people think of PR, they picture crisis management, damage control, and spin — a team of consultants hired to make something bad look good, at enormous expense and with questionable honesty. It’s a perception that dogs the entire industry, and frankly, it’s not entirely undeserved. High-profile cases like the Bell Pottinger scandal — where a firm was found to have created racially divisive propaganda campaigns on behalf of a client — reinforce exactly the kind of distrust that makes business owners hesitant to invest in communications support at all.

It’s enough to make you think PR needs its own PR firm.

But that version of public relations is not the only version. And it’s not ours.

What Most People Get Wrong About Public Relations

The crisis-and-spin model of PR gets the most attention because it makes the best headlines. A celebrity needs a statement. A corporation needs a narrative. A politician needs a news cycle managed. These are real services that exist, and some firms specialize in exactly that kind of work.
But the vast majority of organizations — small and mid-sized businesses, nonprofits, professional services firms, community institutions — don’t need crisis management. They need something far more useful: a clear, consistent, credible public presence that builds trust with their customers, donors, partners, and community over time.
That’s the work we do every day. And it looks nothing like spin.

What Ethical PR Actually Looks Like

At Jaggers Communications, public relations means helping good organizations tell their story clearly, consistently, and honestly — to the audiences that matter most to them.
In practice, that work begins before a single press release is written. We start by helping clients clarify their own business goals. What does growth look like for your organization this year? Who are your best customers or constituents, and how do they make decisions? What does your organization genuinely stand for, and is that coming through in how you communicate?
Those conversations shape everything that follows. A media strategy built on a clear understanding of your goals will always outperform one built on guesswork or generic best practices.
From there, we build integrated strategies that connect public relations with marketing, social media, and content. Earned media doesn’t live in a silo, and neither does your audience. Your customers are reading your newsletter, following you on LinkedIn, and occasionally catching a mention of your work in a local publication — and all of those touchpoints should tell the same story.

Why Honest Communications Is Also Good Business

We feel strongly about truthful practices, but the argument for ethical PR isn’t only about values — it’s about results.
Trust is the foundation of every lasting client relationship, every loyal customer, and every media relationship that produces ongoing coverage rather than a single transactional mention. When a journalist knows that your organization delivers accurate information and keeps its word, your calls get returned. When your customers know you communicate with them honestly, they become advocates. When your partners see that your public presence matches your private reality, they refer business to you.
Firms that traffic in spin may win a news cycle. Firms that build genuine credibility win over time.
There’s also the practical matter of what happens when dishonest PR strategies unravel — and they do unravel. Bell Pottinger, once one of the most prominent PR firms in the world, collapsed entirely after its racially divisive campaign in South Africa came to light. The firm did not rebrand. It ceased to exist. The reputational damage to its clients was severe and lasting.

Integrity in communications isn’t just the right approach. It’s the durable one.

What Working With an Ethical PR Firm Looks Like

If you’ve been hesitant to invest in public relations because of what you’ve seen or heard about how it works, here’s what partnering with Jaggers Communications actually involves:

  • We listen first. Before we recommend anything, we want to understand your organization, your goals, and your audience.
  • We set realistic expectations. PR is a long game. We’ll tell you what’s achievable in 90 days, what takes six months, and what takes a year — and we won’t promise coverage we can’t deliver.
  • We measure what matters. Impressions and placements are useful data points, but we care more about whether communications activity is actually moving the needle on your business goals.
  • We tell you the truth. If a strategy isn’t working, we’ll say so. If there’s a better approach, we’ll recommend it even if it’s a harder conversation.

Ready to Work With a PR Firm That Works Differently?

If your organization is looking for a communications partner that will help you grow — ethically, strategically, and sustainably — we’d love to start a conversation. Jaggers Communications has spent more than a decade helping Charlottesville-area businesses and organizations build the kind of public presence that earns trust and drives real results.

Contact Marijean today!

Jan 19
Love1

The Hidden Cost of Familiarity: Why Fresh Eyes Catch the Errors Your Team Misses

By Communications

Every communications professional has a version of this story.

A client told us about a nightmare from her previous job. Her team had spent weeks preparing an annual report — a high-stakes document that would go to donors, board members, and community partners. They reviewed it carefully. They proofread it. They passed it around for approvals. They were confident.

When the finished report came back from the printer, the last name of a major donor had been cut off.

For anyone in fundraising, that moment is visceral. A major donor whose name is misspelled — or worse, truncated — in a printed piece is not a small error. It’s a relationship problem. It’s a credibility problem. And because it was printed, there was no fixing it quietly.

The team hadn’t been careless. They had looked at that document so many times that they stopped seeing it.

Why Proofreading Your Own Work Is a Losing Battle

There’s a well-documented cognitive phenomenon behind this kind of error. When you’ve read the same document repeatedly, your brain begins to predict what it expects to see rather than processing what’s actually on the page. You read what you meant to write, not what you wrote. Typos disappear. Truncated names become invisible. A transposed number in a budget table goes unnoticed through round after round of review.

This isn’t a failure of professionalism or attention. It’s how human cognition works. The more familiar you are with a piece of content, the less reliably you can proof it.

It’s why newspapers have copy editors. It’s why publishers have proofreaders. It’s why even the most experienced writers will tell you: never proof your own work before it goes out the door.

For small and mid-sized organizations — especially nonprofits, where staff wear multiple hats and bandwidth is always stretched — this principle is easy to know and very hard to act on. When you’re the person who wrote the annual report, managed the design process, coordinated approvals, and is now also responsible for final proofing, bringing in a genuinely fresh set of eyes can feel like a luxury.

It isn’t. It’s insurance.

What a Fresh Pair of Eyes Actually Catches

At Jaggers Communications, we don’t trust our own eyes to a final proof on content going out into the world — and we bring that same discipline to our clients’ work. Before any significant piece of communication is published or printed, we dedicate a proofreader and editor who has never seen the document before to give it a complete review.

That independence is the whole point. A fresh reader brings no assumptions about what the document is supposed to say. They see what’s actually on the page.

In practice, that means catching errors that slip through even rigorous internal review:

  • Proper nouns — names of donors, board members, partner organizations, elected officials — are among the most common error sites in organizational communications. Spell-check won’t flag a real name that’s been subtly misspelled, and a team member who knows the person may read right past the error.
  • Numbers and dates are another high-risk category. A transposed digit in a financial figure, a wrong year in a grant deadline, an incorrect event date — these errors are invisible to a brain that knows what the number is supposed to be.
  • Formatting inconsistencies — a heading that doesn’t match the style of its peers, a caption that belongs to the wrong image, a page number that doesn’t sequence correctly — are nearly impossible to catch when you’ve been looking at the document for weeks.
  • Tone and clarity issues that felt fine in draft often reveal themselves to a reader coming in cold. A sentence that made sense in context during the writing process may read as confusing or even unintentionally off-brand to someone encountering it fresh.

The Documents That Deserve a Final Review

Not every piece of content carries the same stakes. A social media post can be corrected in seconds. A printed annual report cannot.

The communications that most benefit from a dedicated fresh-eyes review are those where errors are costly, embarrassing, or impossible to correct after distribution. That includes:

  • Annual reports
  • Grant applications and reports to funders
  • Event programs
  • Donor acknowledgment letters
  • Printed marketing materials
  • Press releases and media pitches
  • Board presentations

For any document where the consequences of an error outweigh the cost of a final review — and that threshold is lower than most organizations assume — bringing in outside eyes is simply the responsible choice.

How Jaggers Communications Can Help

If your team is stretched thin and needs extra capacity at the final stage of a communications project, Jaggers Communications offers editorial review and proofreading as a standalone service. Our reviewers come to your document without any of the context or familiarity that makes internal proofing unreliable. We catch what your team has stopped seeing.

We also offer broader communications support — helping organizations with writing, editing, content strategy, and communications planning — so if the bandwidth problem goes deeper than a single document, we can help you think through that too.

The annual report nightmare our client described? It was expensive, embarrassing, and entirely preventable. A fresh pair of eyes before it went to print would have caught it.

That’s worth the investment.

Contact Jaggers Communications to talk about editorial support.

Mar 23
Love1

Marketers: Be Mindful of Mother’s Day

By Marketing, Social Media

There’s an opportunity to earn respect and brand recognition through offering NOT to contact customers and truly, it’s refreshing. The latest marketing bandwagon has brands reaching out offering to allow customers to opt out of Mother’s Day marketing. 

Why is this a good idea?

First of all, Mother’s Day is a tough, sensitive holiday, invented by the greeting card companies and fraught with grief and pain. Mother’s Day, more than many other commercial holidays, really seems to hit a lot of people in a particularly tender spot. Also, after two years of a deadly pandemic, many of us are grieving and a reminder of that isn’t helpful. By allowing consumers to take a pass on the flowers and breakfast-in-bed marketing content brand are demonstrating listening to consumer needs and registering an attitude of caring.

Now, for some cynicism.

If you decide to opt out, know that you’re providing data to these companies, letting them know whether Mother’s Day content is even worth the budget. Perhaps it’s not. Or, they will repackage the content or special offers in another way, on another date, just to make sure they haven’t lost your attention.

Do it anyway.

Consumers like it when brands care, and will remember the first few that ask and offer this opt out option. If an opt-out outreach doesn’t fit your marketing model and you’re moving ahead with Mother’s Day-related content, think about an acknowledgement that this holiday is difficult for some, and be sensitive to how your content will be received before launching it.

What will you do? Will you adjust your marketing plans or social media posts? Will you launch an opt-out campaign?

Jan 06
Love0

2021 in Review: From a Beer Brewed to Pair with Duke’s Mayo to Leadership Changes

By Public Relations

As we begin the eleventh year of business for Jaggers Communications, I can’t help but reflect on our most recent history, the rather unusual past two years. 2020 and 2021 were not business as usual for anyone. For Jaggers Communications and, I imagine, much of the public relations business in general, this is what kind of work dominated:

  • Transitions. It’s always been true that we help clients navigate a change in leadership, crafting the language that communicates consistency, inspires confidence, and reassures an audience that despite (or because of) a change in leadership (or in services), that the show can and will go on, and how. We saw quite a bit of that the past two years and anticipate with the continuing pandemic, impact of climate change, and economic difficulties brought about by the aforementioned, we will continue to provide services related to corporate and nonprofit transitions.
  • Crisis. Ah, yes. There was plenty of crisis work, and not all related to the pandemic, either. We specialize in crisis communications work and while we often get called when the crisis is well upon a client, we are truly thrilled to work with clients to prepare in advance of any crisis which may befall them. It is possible to prepare, and clients are always glad when they’ve taken time in advance to think a potential crisis through.
  • Celebration. It’s not all gloom and hair on fire in the PR world. In fact, we had many reasons to celebrate client successes, then reap the glory as those successes were picked up by national and regional media outlets, increasing their reach and brand recognition. 2021 was a banner year for this and who would have thought a mayonnaise-inspired beer would have been the subject of much of that coverage?

We look forward to seeing what this year will bring, and what surprises might be in store!

 

Oct 19
Love0

When Should Your Organization Conduct a Marketing Audit?

By Marketing

There are a few key stages in which a marketing audit can best benefit your organization.

  1. If you’ve never conducted an audit before, and are unsure how effective your marketing and outreach efforts are, then now is clearly the time to do so.
  2. Are you making a change in marketing and communications staff? If you’re thinking about restructuring, or are at a stage in which you need to hire a new director of marketing, a thorough look at what’s been working and how it aligns with the organization’s goals are in order. It can, as it did in one case recently, inform at what level your new hire should enter the company.
  3. It’s been three years since you last made any changes to your marketing and communications strategy. Every business changes over a three-year period, and the three-year mark is an excellent time to benchmark and set new goals.

But what does a marketing audit include?

This is the process Jaggers Communications employs:

LEARN: We will learn about the organization’s business goals and objectives and the marketing goals and objectives that support the broader goals. We will ask a lot of questions to learn about your customer profile, donors, grant sources, and any other audiences. We’re interested in your long-term relationships, what creates loyalty, and what audiences represent your most recent growth.

GATHER: We will ask for descriptions of all products and services, including information about what has been the marketing focus or prioritization of each over the past three years.

We will ask for access to all available analytics and marketing data for the past three years, your business plan, your milestone tracking sheet, and other benchmark or tracking documentation you have used. We will look at examples of all marketing assets and collateral, including any press releases and earned media.  We will review newsletters, social media accounts, examples of members-only content, and any other forms of communication that were used in the past three years.

REVIEW AND ANALYZE: We will review all of your data and materials, draw conclusions from what we observe, and provide a report that analyzes strengths and weaknesses of your marketing efforts.

If you’re interested in learning more, please get in touch.