In 2016, armed men broke into my aunt Berta Cáceres’s home in Honduras and murdered her. She was a human rights and environmental activist who had spent her life defending indigenous land rights. What followed for my family — and for thousands of people who knew her work — was a decade-long fight for justice that played out in courtrooms, congressional offices, major newsrooms, and on the streets of Tegucigalda and Washington D.C. Putting that campaign on paper as a retrospective strategic communications plan clarified something: when you’ve already done the work, made the calls, placed the pieces, you understand what strategic communications actually is.
This is what I learned:
The first 72 hours decide what locks in. When a crisis breaks, a counter-narrative is already moving. Pre-built relationships, ready messaging, and the willingness to act fast are not optional.
Audience is not one audience. Press, policymakers, embassies, public audiences in two languages — each requires its own entry point. The core message holds; the framing shifts.
Coalition beats centralized control. Trust-based relationships across partner organizations let parallel efforts reinforce each other. Message alignment, not uniformity.
Not every outlet is your outlet. Some platforms exist to advance their interests, not yours. The discipline of saying no is part of the work.
Format must evolve. Short-form video for breaking news, op-eds for policy moments, sustained speaking for the long arc. Plan for evolution rather than treating it as deviation.
Strategic communications succeeds when it closes the distance between an audience and the people the work is about. Policy abstractions don’t move anyone. Statistics don’t move anyone. What moves people is the recognition that the person on the screen, in the article, or on the stage is not a stranger.
This campaign also taught me something harder to articulate. The doors that opened for me — congressional offices, major newsrooms, op-ed pages — opened in part because of where I grew up, where I went to school, and the career I’d built. Berta and her colleagues fought the same fight with far fewer of those advantages. That’s not something I take lightly. It’s part of why I want to keep doing this work — putting that access and those skills in service of organizations and communities that need them.