National Housing Development Corporation
Public Relations and Branding Campaign
The Challenge
National Housing Development Corporation, a nonprofit corporation, improves the quality of life for low-income families by stabilizing and revitalizing neighborhoods via acquisition and preservation of our nation’s affordable housing stock. Despite being one of the nation’s largest nonprofits dedicated to the preservation of affordable housing, awareness of NHDC was low among key stakeholders. Plus, NHDC’s sudden emergence, its provocative challenges to established thought norms and its rapid success in securing funding and recognition created some friction among stakeholders who should have been among NHDC’s biggest supporters.
The Approach
The communications strategy for NHDC was designed to create awareness of current affordable housing challenges and the solutions offered by NHDC. In addition to building the organization’s reputation, our strategy was to work with the media to provide third-party credibility and influence key audiences responsible for funding, financing, regulating, partnering with and eventually approving new industry models of acquisition, repositioning, refinancing and preservation.
The Results
WGM secured 85 local and national stories, including coverage in The Business Press, CBS Marketwatch, National Mortgage News and Forbes.com—an increase of 2,700 percent. NHDC’s portfolio of properties grew to over 4,150 rental housing units affordable to low- and moderate-income families nationwide due to an increase in government funding combined with increased awareness of NHDC among multi-unit property owners.