How Husch Blackwell Strategies keeps clients across the nation connected to fast-changing legislative news

The government affairs firm uses Axios HQ to send hundreds of updates a month

The challenge: Husch Blackwell Strategies (HBS) keeps business leaders, stakeholders, and clients across the country plugged into state and federal legislative updates. It has nine state capital offices across the nation and a federal practice group in Washington, D.C. 

Previously, some HBS offices were using different platforms to craft and send communications, but they weren’t user-friendly and often experienced glitches — causing inefficiencies in delivering timely information and making it hard to serve their subscribers. They needed a simpler solution. It had to be:

• Branded: Their brand is well-known and well-trusted. Everything from banners to layouts to colors to fonts needed to feel unique but uniform.
• Targeted: Each office has its own exclusive contact list. They needed to track performance in one place, but target different audiences with tailored messaging. 

The solution: HBS uses Axios HQ for two core strategies: legislative updates, alerts, and announcements to external subscribers and frequent internal updates to staff. Internal open rates reached over 90% and among clients — who might receive multiple updates daily and hundreds in a month — engagement is high, too, reaching 50-70% open rates. 

💭 Tamara Mohamed, Marketing Communications Advisor:

• "I like the AI features and many of our team members have found them to be very useful. The Smart Brevity and Thought Starter tools significantly help reduce time spent on creating communications and to-the-point messaging that engages their audiences’ specific needs.”
• "The audience segment feature is extremely beneficial especially for communicating timely updates. My colleagues highly value this, particularly when they need to send a one-off message to a single client. In our fast-moving industry, the ability to be able to do this with ease and efficiency is a game-changer.” 

How it works: Tamara trains and educates team members on Axios HQ before they begin sharing communications. She sets up templates for each office, with audience, custom banners, and other core elements that are critical to the brand — but unique to the communication — so others can stay focused on what’s changing in public policy.

Whether it’s breaking news or a scheduled update, team members use Axios HQ’s Smart Brevity Guidance to stay succinct and get the information out to constituents as soon as they’re ready to hit send. 

🧠  Tamara’s words of encouragement:

• “Every time I complete a training, it makes me smile when I hear, ‘Oh wow! I can't believe it really is this easy. I'm excited to start using this.’” 

Husch Blackwell Strategies earned Axios HQ's 2024 Best-in-Class award for Culture Creator. See our other award winners:

• 2024 Best-in-Class Change Communications
• 2024 Best-in-Class Community Engagement
• 2024 Best-in-Class Best All-Staff