BLAIR & Brandon
Dottin-Haley

WHAT WE DO

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We build campaigns that move people to act—not just nod.

Every organization has a message. Few organizations have a campaign. The difference is the difference between awareness and action, between reaching people and moving them, between saying the right thing and saying it in a way that creates real change.

The Dottin-Haley Group designs and executes messaging campaigns for nonprofits, educational institutions, and advocacy organizations working on the issues that matter most: environmental justice, community health and wellness, Black history and culture, and educational equity. We bring strategic clarity to complex causes—developing the message, identifying the audiences, building the channels, and driving the outcomes our clients need.

 

 

A campaign isn’t a press release and a social post. It’s a sustained strategy to move people from awareness to action. That’s what we build.

 

OUR APPROACH:

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How we build campaigns that work.

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Message Development

We distill complex issues, policy positions, and organizational values into clear, compelling messages that resonate with diverse audiences without losing nuance or truth.

 

Audience Strategy

We identify who needs to hear your message, what they already believe, what moves them to act, and how to reach them through the channels they actually use.

 

Multi-Channel Execution

From community convenings and public events to social media, earned media, and petition drives, we design campaigns that reach people across every relevant touchpoint.

 

Advocacy & Mobilization

When the goal is policy change or institutional action, we build the coalition, the community voice, and the pressure campaign needed to get decision-makers to move.

 

Institutional Partnership

We bring in the right organizational partners to amplify reach, add credibility, and build the kind of coalition that sustains a campaign beyond its initial launch.

 

Impact Measurement

We define what success looks like before the campaign launches—signatures, reach, policy outcomes, community engagement—and track it throughout.

 

 

CAMPAIGNS WE’VE BUILT

Advocacy, awareness, and institutional change—built on strategy, executed with precision.

 

CASE STUDY

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Sierra Club  •  Climate Conversations Campaign

New Orleans, Louisiana  •  Completed

 

Building a Climate Justice Movement in the City That Has the Most to Lose

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New Orleans sits at the front line of the climate crisis—a city built below sea level, surrounded by sinking land, and facing intensifying storms, industrial pollution, and environmental inequity that falls heaviest on its Black and low-income communities. When the Sierra Club needed a messaging campaign that could turn that reality into public action, they brought in The Dottin-Haley Group.

 

Climate justice in New Orleans isn’t an abstract cause. It’s a matter of survival. Our campaign was built to make people feel that—and then do something about it.

 

The Challenge

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Climate advocacy often struggles to break through—either because the message feels too distant and technical, or because it doesn’t speak to the communities most directly affected. The Sierra Club needed a campaign that could do all three things at once: educate the public on climate justice issues, mobilize community voices, and create measurable advocacy pressure through petitions and civic engagement.

 

What We Built

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The Dottin-Haley Group developed and executed a multi-pronged messaging campaign that centered community voices and local impact. We designed the message strategy, built the community engagement infrastructure, executed public events and conversations, and drove an advocacy mobilization effort that reached thousands of New Orleanians across neighborhoods, institutions, and civic networks.

• Developed the campaign’s core message strategy, framing climate justice as a local, immediate, and community-specific issue

• Designed and executed virtual conversations to activate international audiences across US and Africa.

• Built petition infrastructure and mobilization strategy targeting community members, civic organizations, and institutional partners

• Drove outreach through multi-channel communications including social media, community networks, and direct engagement

• Engaged policy and legislative stakeholders to connect community voice to decision-making processes

 

10,000+

Petition signatures generated

 

3

Campaign goals: education, mobilization, policy pressure

 

1

Planet. Multiple Countries. One unified message.

 

 

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CASE STUDY

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NOLA Public Schools  •  Student Mental Wellness Campaign

New Orleans, Louisiana  •  Completed

 

Changing the Conversation About Mental Health—Inside Schools and Beyond Them

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Mental health stigma doesn’t stop at the schoolhouse door—it follows students home and travels back in with them the next morning. For NOLA Public Schools, addressing student mental wellness required more than programming: it required a campaign that could shift how students, educators, families, and the broader public thought about and talked about mental health in schools.

 

The most effective mental health campaign doesn’t just inform—it normalizes. It gives students a language for what they’re feeling and a community willing to hear it.

 

The Challenge

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NOLA Public Schools needed a campaign that could operate on two fronts simultaneously: inside schools, shifting the culture around mental health among students and educators; and outside schools, engaging families and the broader community in the conversation. The campaign needed to feel authentic to students—not top-down or clinical—while also being coherent and credible enough to move institutional stakeholders.

 

The Campaign

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The Dottin-Haley Group designed and executed an integrated communications campaign anchored in two complementary strategies: a student-led media platform that elevated authentic student voice, and a community-facing engagement effort that extended the conversation into the public sphere.

 

Inside Schools: Student Voice as the Message

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We developed a podcast series that gave students a platform to speak candidly about the mental health issues they themselves identified as most urgent. The series was not scripted or curated to be comfortable—it was designed to be honest. Students produced content that spoke to their peers, modeled openness around mental wellness, and created a lasting media artifact of their voices and their experience.

• Produced a student-led podcast series addressing mental health topics students identified as most important to their lives

• Designed podcast as both a communications tool and a community-building platform—students as producers, not just subjects

• Extended internal campaign through mental wellness assembly programming reaching hundreds of students and educators

 

Beyond Schools: Community & Family Engagement

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The external campaign extended the conversation into families and the New Orleans community—connecting the school-based initiative to a broader public dialogue about youth mental wellness, community support systems, and the responsibilities institutions carry for the young people in their care.

• Developed family-facing messaging strategy to connect school programming to home conversations

• Built public communications positioning NOLA Public Schools as a proactive institutional leader on student mental wellness

• Supported media and community outreach to extend campaign visibility beyond the school system

 

200+

Students and educators reached by the campaign

 

2

Audiences: Internal (schools) and Public-facing

 

1

Student-produced podcast series at the center of it all

 

 

 

 

CASE STUDY

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●  ACTIVE CAMPAIGN

 

Black Education for New Orleans (BE NOLA)  •  Black Education History Week Campaign

New Orleans, Louisiana  •  Active Campaign

 

Making Black Education History Week Official—District-Wide, Policy-Backed, and Permanent

Two seasons of the Black Is Brilliant documentary series produced something more than compelling film. They produced an evidence base—firsthand testimony from New Orleans’ own historic Black educational institutions, verified by Black educational scholars from across the country—that now anchors one of the most significant education advocacy campaigns currently active in the city.

The Dottin-Haley Group is building the messaging campaign to codify Black Education History Week with the Orleans Parish School Board and implement district-wide programming that puts that evidence base into classrooms, into policy, and into the permanent cultural life of New Orleans schools.

 

 

Black Education History Week isn’t a celebration we’re asking the district to permit. It’s a recognition we’re building the case to make permanent—backed by scholarship, community voice, and the institutions that built Black excellence in this city.

 

The Foundation: What Black Is Brilliant Built

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Before a campaign can move policy, it needs to move people—and before it can move people, it needs something true and documented to say. Black Is Brilliant gave this campaign exactly that.

• Season 1 gathered firsthand testimony from educators, alumni, and administrators at New Orleans’ historically Black institutions—St. Augustine High School, St. Mary’s Academy, McDonogh 35, and others—documenting the pedagogical practices that have made these schools models of Black educational excellence

• Season 2 brought that testimony into dialogue with leading Black educational scholars—Dr. Akosua Lesesne, Dr. Camika Royal, and Dr. Kevin Lawrence Henry Jr.—who provided the academic framework and national scholarly validation that transforms community knowledge into evidence-based advocacy

• The BE NOLA Black Is Brilliant Digital Syllabus distilled the series’ findings into a structured educational resource that practitioners, policymakers, and schools can apply directly

 

The Campaign: From Research to Policy

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The Dottin-Haley Group is now building the advocacy campaign that takes this body of work to the Orleans Parish School Board—making the case for the official codification of Black Education History Week and the implementation of district-wide programming aligned to its principles.

• Developing the campaign’s policy messaging framework: the argument for why Black Education History Week deserves official district recognition, grounded in the research from both seasons of the series

• Identifying and building the coalition of community stakeholders, institutional partners, educators, and scholars whose voices will carry the campaign to the school board

• Designing the district-wide programming implementation strategy: what Black Education History Week looks like across OPSB schools, what resources it requires, and how it gets sustained year over year

• Building the public-facing campaign that generates community awareness, parent engagement, and civic pressure in support of the codification effort

• Developing school board communications strategy: how to present the research, who presents it, and how to move from awareness to a board vote

 

Why This Campaign Matters

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New Orleans has one of the richest traditions of Black educational excellence in the country. Institutions like St. Augustine, St. Mary’s, and McDonogh 35 have produced generations of Black leaders—doctors, attorneys, artists, activists, and community builders—through pedagogical approaches grounded in cultural affirmation, high expectation, and community accountability.

Black Education History Week, codified by the school district that serves the city those institutions built, would be a formal recognition of that legacy—and a commitment to carry it forward for every student in New Orleans public schools. This campaign is about making that recognition permanent.

 

2

Seasons of documentary evidence behind the campaign

 

6+

Historic Black institutions whose voices anchor the advocacy

 

1

Policy goal: official OPSB codification of Black Education History Week