Onsight has been working with the Colorado Water Trust to raise awareness about a pilot water leasing program called Request for Water 2012. This program will help conserve water in Colorado through our extremely dry summer, and we’ve helped make sure this innovative effort has gotten the attention it deserves.
A recent release from the Colorado Water Trust highlights some of the great coverage the program has received in recent weeks:
Over the past 15 days, Request for Water 2012 has received consistent media coverage including:
- A front page story (above the fold) in the Denver Post;
- A spot on Colorado Public Radio;
- Coverage on KKCO-TV, the Grand Junction NBC station; and
- Pieces in many newspaper articles, blogs, and radio stations across Colorado.
OnSight is proud to be working with school officials, parents, and current and former students to help Andrew Menard – one of Amos Steck Elementary School’s most beloved teachers and winner of Denver Public Schools’ 2011 Distinguished Teacher Award – on an unusual and serious quest. These loyal friends, students, and colleagues are helping to raise awareness about kidney disease…and along the way they hope to find Mr. Mendard a kidney. Mr. Menard has been diagnosed with polycystic kidney disease, and as standard treatments are becoming less effective, his search for a cure is getting more critical.
It was our pleasure to lend a hand and help Andrew and the Steck community get some attention from the local media. We also want to thank the reporters and photographers who came out for such a good cause.
To date, we know that the “Kids 4 Kidneys” project has succeeded in reaching at least several individuals have volunteered to be tested to see if they are a donor match.
We continue to wish the best for Andrew, and will be following his story closely.
They don't make cards for twins!
We want to wish OnSight Public Affairs Senior Strategist George Merritt and his wife Liz a double-dose of congratulations for the birth of their twin daughters Sarah Bell and Eleanor Day. The girls joined the world on February 17th, and are happy and healthy and getting to spend some quality time with their proud (but exhausted) parents, not to mention making headlines.
Our best wishes to the entire family!
The Denver Post has hosted the Ride the Rockies event for many years, but now it is time for the plains to have their moment. Governor Hickenlooper’s office is is partnering up with the Denver Post to put on a new ride that takes participants on a ride through the eastern plains of Colorado. Viaero Wireless, the up and coming new cellular company in eastern CO, is on board as the title sponsor and the combination of these three should bring a great new addition to the myriad of fun recreational diversions in Colorado.
The ride is set to take place September 21st to the 23rd, so it will be a nice wind down from all of the big summer events, and a great way to discover a part of Colorado that is often overlooked. The best part? Onsight has been hired to work on the branding, website and communications for the project. We are very excited to get another great bicycling event as part of our growing place in the sports and bicycling world! We have some really great plans for this race that will make it a truly unique event for Colorado.
Stay tuned for updates on the progress of the development of this exciting new event.
The placeholder website allows signups for updates on registration and events related to the ride. Go there to sign up: http://www.pedaltheplains.com
The Colorado Licensed Beverage Association has launched their new website. We spent a solid month working with Jeanne Mcevoy, the director, to get a site that helps progress their mission and encourage better communication with members. We helped to write content, develop a new logo, print new business cards, refresh the look of the organization and make a site that serves their members with the same quality online as they have already been provided offline.
While CLBA has done a great job on Facebook in the past, we also reworked their Social Media campaigning and developed new strategies to make sure they are getting the most out of their time in the social networking world. It was a pleasure working with Jeanne, and she was gracious with her compliments of our work:
“It doesn’t get any better than this! OnSight’s creative, team-oriented approach consistently produces results for CLBA. They guided us through an overhaul of our brand, built us a new website, and make sure we are successful under the gold dome year after year.”
Click the screenshot below to visit the new site:
Project New West Summit in Las Vegas
The Intermountain West was critical to the Democrats in 2008, but will it be even more important in 2012?
You can bet on it.
That’s why Project New West convened the top political strategists from around the country to discuss how we frame Western issues on the eve of the 2012 presidential race. The Western Summit featured speakers like Tom Brokaw, Ted Turner, Senator Harry Reid, and our own Senator Mark Udall, Senator Michael Bennett and, Governor John Hickenlooper.
We also released new polling data from Western states that will provide many with critical insight into the electorate and help them effectively message both traditional and emerging demographic groups.
Lot’s of good ideas and insights came out of the panels and presentations at the Summit. Let’s all hope that, at least this time, what happens in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas.
Denver Post:
The West is an increasingly important political battleground, and Democrats hope to show they are better suited to appeal to their base as well as the ever-important independent-minded voter, said Jill Hanauer, president of the Colorado-based Project New West
“Folks do things differently out here,” she said. “Voters here vote for the person, not the party, and the policy, not the ideology. You don’t get elected by just folks from your own party, you need independents and others from the other party.”
Project New West’s 2011 summit is pulling in the region’s top business leaders, politicians and academics for three days of panels focusing on emerging issues in the New American West.
Read more: Powerful Western Democrats meeting in Vegas
AP:
LAS VEGAS—Western states are becoming more urban and diverse, with an influx of Hispanic, Asian and young voters who tend to vote against Republican candidates, according to political strategists who spoke Monday at a Democratic conference.
“The trend is worrisome if you are a Republican,” Robert Lang, a sociology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said during the event.
The battle to win the West is being planned in Las Vegas this week, with Republican and Democratic political consultants holding dueling strategy meetings.
The Nation:
As the 2012 elections approach, both parties are furiously jockeying for position. If the Democrats can turn out their votes in sufficient numbers, Western strategists believe, the party could regain many of the House seats it lost in last year’s GOP landslide, while holding the Senate and retaining the White House. If the Democrats fail to do so, the GOP could enjoy an electoral sweep.
The stakes could hardly be higher: For many residents in the region, the battle for 2012 is about basic economic survival. Yet the contours of what the Western fight will look like are still being drawn.
“Now more than ever,” averred Project New West president Jill Hanauer, “the nation should look west for new ideas. We vote for the person, not the party; the policy position and leadership, not the ideology.” For generations, she continued, people in the West have cherished both their communities and their independence, creating a politics suspicious of centralized government but determined to innovate at a local level.
Read more: The Democratic Plan to Recapture the West
National Journal:
Yet during a public panel that I moderated here sponsored by Project New West, a Democratic research organization, leading party strategists expressed unruffled, almost blithe, optimism about Obama’s ability to hold the three Mountain states he carried in 2008. Partly that was because they expect more young people and minorities to vote in 2012 than did in 2010. But it was primarily because they think Obama will benefit from the contrast with the eventual Republican nominee. The Democratic hope is that those twin dynamics will allow Obama to reassemble the coalition of minorities and suburban whites that reelected Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet last year in Colorado.
As Tuesday’s raucous GOP debate underscored, the Republican nominee will provide Obama plenty of clear contrasts. All of the contenders are betting they can sell a larger retrenchment of government than any GOP nominee has proposed since Reagan (if not Barry Goldwater); they are doubling down on pledges to dismantle environmental regulation and unshackle domestic energy production. The stakes on that wager won’t be greater anywhere than in the increasingly pivotal Mountain West, where acute anxiety about jobs jostles against enduring affection for the land.
Read more: Rocky Territory