United For A Fair Economy

United For A Fair Economy’s Responsible Wealth Project
Project:  Responsible Wealth, a project of United for a Fair Economy, is a network of over 700 business leaders and wealthy individuals in the top 5% of wealth and/or income in the US who use their surprising voice to advocate for fair taxes and corporate accountability.  They retained Roth PR to increase awareness of their work to ensure that the Bush tax cuts affecting the wealthiest Americans are allowed to expire as planned in 2010.
Challenge:  Although the Bush tax cuts were set to expire at the end of 2010 if no action by the President or Congress is taken, it was not on their immediate agenda so the topic was barely being addressed in the media.  Responsible Wealth had developed a Tax Fairness Pledge for their members to estimate their tax savings from the Bush tax cuts, and redirect those savings to support tax fairness efforts at the national and state level.   The Tax Fairness Pledge project, however, had just started, had just a few members who had signed on and none were famous.  We could not entice media with a big name, big numbers nor offer another angle to a story they were covering since they were not yet reporting on the President’s budget nor this policies on the Bush tax cuts.
Solution:  Roth PR recommended that we target the lead up to tax season and April 15th and news coverage surrounding tax day as the best window to launch the Tax Fairness Pledge story while identifying Responsible Wealth members who had taken the pledge and had compelling personal stories.  We then focused on the man-bites-dog angle of the story “Millionaires Want To Pay More Taxes.”  We scheduled a teleconference for April 6th to give media time to do their reporting or book one of our spokespersons in time for their Tax Week coverage leading up to April 15th.
Results:  Reporters from major media outlets participated in our teleconference including USA Today, 3 reporters from the Washington Post, the New York Times, Associated Press, Bloomberg News, The Hill, Pacifica Radio and more.  We had also secured a story prior to the teleconference with Dow Jones News, and teleconference preview items ran in USA Today and The Hill leading up to the call.  In the next days stories on Responsible Wealth’s Tax Fairness Pledge ran in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, the Hill , MarketWatch, CongressDaily, The Hill and USA Today which lead to more stories, including The Economist, bookings and stories on NPR, Fox News Channel’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto,” CNBC’s “Kudlow and Company” and MSNBC’s “Dylan Ratigan.”.The outreach and coverage increased awareness of the issue and of Responsible Wealth among these reporters who would then cover the issue in the Spring when the Bush tax cuts were scheduled to be debated in Congress along with President Obama’s budget.

Responsible Wealth Project

Project: Responsible Wealth, a project of United for a Fair Economy, is a network of over 700 business leaders and wealthy individuals in the top 5% of wealth and/or income in the US who use their surprising voice to advocate for fair taxes and corporate accountability.  They retained Roth PR to increase awareness of their work to ensure that the Bush tax cuts affecting the wealthiest Americans are allowed to expire as planned in 2010.

Challenge: Although the Bush tax cuts were set to expire at the end of 2010 if no action by the President or Congress is taken, it was not on their immediate agenda so the topic was barely being addressed in the media.  Responsible Wealth had developed a Tax Fairness Pledge for their members to estimate their tax savings from the Bush tax cuts, and redirect those savings to support tax fairness efforts at the national and state level.   The Tax Fairness Pledge project, however, had just started, had just a few members who had signed on and none were famous.  We could not entice media with a big name, big numbers nor offer another angle to a story they were covering since they were not yet reporting on the President’s budget nor this policies on the Bush tax cuts.

Solution: Roth PR recommended that we target the lead up to tax season and April 15th and news coverage surrounding tax day as the best window to launch the Tax Fairness Pledge story while identifying Responsible Wealth members who had taken the pledge and had compelling personal stories.  We then focused on the man-bites-dog angle of the story “Millionaires Want To Pay More Taxes.”  We scheduled a teleconference for April 6th to give media time to do their reporting or book one of our spokespersons in time for their Tax Week coverage leading up to April 15th.

Results: Reporters from major media outlets participated in our teleconference including USA Today, 3 reporters from the Washington Post, the New York Times, Associated Press, Bloomberg News, The Hill, Pacifica Radio and more.  We had also secured a story prior to the teleconference with Dow Jones News, and teleconference preview items ran in USA Today and The Hill leading up to the call.  In the next days stories on Responsible Wealth’s Tax Fairness Pledge ran in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, the Hill , MarketWatch, CongressDaily, The Hill and USA Today which lead to more stories, including The Economist, bookings and stories on NPR, Fox News Channel’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto,” CNBC’s “Kudlow and Company” and MSNBC’s “Dylan Ratigan.”.The outreach and coverage increased awareness of the issue and of Responsible Wealth among these reporters who would then cover the issue in the Spring when the Bush tax cuts were scheduled to be debated in Congress along with President Obama’s budget.

Coverage:

Congress Daily National Journal “Millionaires’ Group Willing To Pay More”

The Wall Street Journal “Some Wealthy Say: Go Ahead, Tax Me More”