Renna Communications

White House Easter Egg Roll 2006

Turning crisis into opportunity

When our client, Family Pride, found themselves at the center of a media firestorm and political backlash for its role in organizing LGBT families to attend the White House Easter Egg Roll in 2006, we sprang to action and successfully transformed the situation using crisis communications skills. We took a critical situation in which our client was being villianized by the religious right for political gain and shaped an end result in which our client gained tremendous, positive media coverage (as well as successfully co-opting the White House’s own photo opportunity!).

Although the actual Egg Roll occurs in April, an email was circulated in January of 2006 that contained information about the plans by LGBT families organized by Family Pride to attend the event. The crisis for our client began when a right-wing journalist who is part of the White House Press corps obtained a copy of the email, brought it up – much to the surprise of the WH press secretary – and began what could have been a cascade of sensationalized coverage. In response, we worked Family Pride, their partners in the event and key journalists to reframe the story, correct misinformation from the religious right and contain the information released publicly.

For example, we:

• Convened appropriate senior staff from Family Pride for brief strategy and messaging meeting immediately when we became aware of the situation;
• Immediately issued a brief statement from Family Pride and posted it on their web site;
• Immediately contacted and requested a statement from Soulforce, the organization the sent out the email that inadvertently ended up in the hands of anti-gay activists;
• Performed immediate outreach to key mainstream national-level journalists, LGBT media and the White House Press Corps;
• Engaged in extensive follow-up until the story was framed accurately and began planning for the actual event with the potential for continued controversy in mind;
• Created detailed and strategic plan for media outreach during the weeks approaching the event, the weekend of the event and the Egg Roll itself, as well as following up after with calls and photos to LGBT media; and
• Responded to a crisis within the crisis when the White House broke procedure to give tickets to those who were in line in non-chronological order (resulting in the LGBT families receiving tickets that allowed admission after the time when the White House Press Corps would normally have departed – as well as rumors that the break in procedure was aimed at denying the Press Corps the opportunity of photographing the LGBT families against the backdrop of the White House).

At the end of the day, we were able to help our client leverage this crisis into primarily positive media coverage worth well over $1 million and to help them spread their message to more than 16.5 million people by television alone.