PR Strategy Case Study — Coreforce
Earning trust with public safety’s most cautious buyers.
How it started
Coreforce sells integrated technology to public safety agencies: dispatch, records, video, evidence, and corrections systems on one platform. We’d already worked with the company on its identity, voice, and rollout. The next job was getting the new brand in front of the people who decide what agencies buy.
That audience is hard to reach and slow to trust. Police chiefs, sheriffs, district attorneys, city managers, and IT directors are risk-averse, they ask their peers before they ask a vendor, and plenty of them are locked into long contracts with companies that have burned them before. The category is also politically charged. One badly framed story about policing can pull a technology vendor into a fight it never wanted.
Coreforce needed a PR strategy that would build credibility with those buyers without adding risk along the way.
What we did
We started with the buyer. We built a composite persona we called the Chief Modernizer: the chief of a mid-sized suburban city of about 125,000 people, with 225 sworn officers and 50 civilian staff. His bodycams, in-car video, and evidence servers don’t talk to each other, FOIA requests get filled by hand, and the city council keeps asking about accountability. We picked this persona on purpose. An agency that size needs an integrated system but is small enough to move quickly, so buying cycles are shorter and a good reference story travels. We mapped his pain points, motivators, and objections, the events that start a buying process (a failed rollout, a new modernization initiative, a lawsuit or scandal over missing footage), and how he moves from awareness to decision. That included where he gets his information and the two or three reference customers he wants to talk to before signing.
Then we looked at the people around him. Eight other roles can help or block a deal: deputy chiefs and captains, district attorneys, city and county managers, public information officers, union representatives, IT directors, corrections administrators, and the officers and dispatchers who’d use the system every day. For each one we wrote down what they’re asking themselves. The PIO, for example, wants to know whether this will protect the department from bad headlines or create new ones.
From there we built the PR framework. We recommended earned media in respected trade outlets and regionally important outlets in key markets, with customer voices and outcomes leading and product features in the background. We recommended positioning Coreforce as a technology partner and keeping it out of political framing. We also recommended skipping national consumer media, which carries high risk and little relevance for this audience. We gave the plan a north star, “Mission-critical technology that builds trust,” and used it as a filter: if a story doesn’t show mission-critical impact or a trust-building outcome, it doesn’t belong in the campaign.
How it’s going
Today, four content themes carry the stories you’ll see in the press about Coreforce. Technology That Fits covers scalable, adaptable tools that front-line staff can use without a dedicated IT team. Transparency That Builds Trust covers faster FOIA responses, audit trails, and clean chain of custody. Powered by Frontline Experience puts forward the people on Coreforce’s team who’ve worked the job. Prepared for What’s Next covers real-time tools under real-world pressure. For each theme Coreforce delivers the message, the angle, the social idea, and an owned-content idea, so the team could brief writers and judge a pitch quickly.
Our message matrix is reaching multiple audiences, and each one gets a single ask and a story for each theme. The chief’s ask is to request a pilot or demo. The IT director’s is to sign off on integration. The city manager’s is to put Coreforce in the next budget cycle, the district attorney’s is to endorse it as a trusted evidence solution, and the corrections administrator’s is to adopt one platform from booking to release. Every audience shares the same diagnostic measures: site visits from earned placements, time on page, referral conversions, branded search lift, and social shares.
Coreforce has now built relationships with more than a dozen core outlets and voices. They have garnered mentions in law enforcement and corrections trade press, government technology and civic leadership publications, dispatch and communications media, a criminal justice reporting outlet, and have created relationships with respected figures in policing research, reform, and civic tech.
