"How Do You Create Awareness?" Answering Our Most Frequently Asked Question
spoiler: Awareness isn't the goal. Movement is. Here's how we get there.
By Kim Brown, APR | Co-Founder, Story and Strategy PR
Yesterday, I was having coffee with a leader who helps organizations reach their goals through coaching and consulting. She believed Story and Strategy could help one of her clients that desperately needs people to know about the great work they do. Then she asked me a question I’ve heard hundreds of times in my career…
"We need awareness. How will you do that?"
It’s one of the most common questions we receive as a strategic communications firm. And I understand why. Awareness feels like the front door to everything else (i.e. funding, partnerships, talent and advocacy). Without it, the best work in the world stays invisible.
But here’s what I’ve learned after nearly two decades of doing this. Awareness is not the thing leaders actually need… especially not in the form of a generic press release or a shotgun approach to social media. Action driven by awareness is what yields results.
And the key to that action (actually moving people to do the things you want them to do) is storytelling.
Stories don't live in one place
When we take on a new client, the first thing we do is listen. We want to understand what is really happening inside your organization — the patient outcome that surprised your clinical team, the partnership that almost did not happen, the employee who turned a small idea into a company-wide shift, the data point that nobody outside your four walls has seen yet.
Those are the threads. And once we find them, our job is to figure out where each one belongs.
Here’s the thing a lot of communications plans get wrong. They treat awareness like a single channel problem. Get in the news. Or build the social following. Or send the newsletter. One pipe, one strategy.
Real awareness does not work that way. Stories live in many places, and good ones travel.
Where we take your stories
The media. Sometimes the story belongs in front of a reporter who is already covering your industry. We pitch outlets where your audience is already paying attention, not just the biggest name, but the right one. A story placed in the local business journal can move more deals than a national hit that nobody in your community sees.
Awards and stages. Other times, the same story belongs in an award submission or a speaking proposal. Awards build third-party credibility in a way self-promotion cannot. Speaking engagements put you in front of your peers, not just your audience. Both compound over time, and both can come from the exact same story you almost didn’t tell.
Your own channels. A lot of the most valuable stories never need a journalist at all. They belong on your website, in your social feed, in the online newsroom you should already have. When somebody Googles your organization, what they find should be a current, well-told version of who you are today. Not a press release from 2019.
Video and visuals. Some stories need to be seen, not read. We partner with video teams to bring the human moments to life, because there are some things you cannot capture in a paragraph. The look on a parent's face. The before-and-after of a community project. The texture of the work itself.
There are dozens of other places a story can land (i.e. podcasts, op-eds, internal communications that build your culture from the inside). The point is not the channel. The point is matching the right story to the right place, at the right time.
But awareness is not the goal
This is where I have to be honest with leaders, even the ones who hired us to do exactly what they asked.
Awareness for the sake of awareness is a vanity project. Being known is not the same as being trusted, and being trusted is not the same as moving people to act. If we do our job right, you do not just end up with more people who know about you. You end up with more people who do something: give, advocate, apply, partner, refer, vote, show up.
Movement is the goal. Awareness is just the door we walk through to get there.
How it actually works
When a client engages us, we start with research, quantitative and qualitative. We get to know the people closest to your mission, because they usually already know the best stories without realizing it. We build a strategy with SMART objectives, because hoping is not a plan. And we measure continuously, so we can adjust as we go.
But underneath all of that strategy is one simple practice we never skip. We find the threads that need to be pulled in the fabric of your organization. The things that will capture attention. And then we tell them in a way that sparks an emotion.
Awareness without emotion is noise. And there is already too much noise.
The organizations that get noticed, remembered and trusted in 2026 are not the ones shouting the loudest. They are the ones telling the truest stories, in the right places, to the right people, over time.
If you’ve been wondering how to create awareness for your organization (or quietly suspecting that what you’ve been doing is not working), that’s the kind of conversation we are always happy to have.
Story and Strategy PR is a boutique communications firm based in Fort Worth, Texas, specializing in health care, higher education, public affairs, real estate, start-up and nonprofit communications. Let's connect.
