How to Choose a PR agency for Economic development organizations

By Aidan Sowa, CEO and Founder, Frontier Sectors | October 2026

In 2017, Amazon invited North America to bid for a headquarters, and 238 cities and regions answered, many of them in secret. The winning announcements were celebrated. Then the incentive figures leaked, the New York deal collapsed under public pressure, and the whole episode became the defining cautionary tale of your profession. Every economic development organization now works in its shadow. The agency you hire will either understand that the announcement is the beginning of the argument, or it will learn at your expense.

I Discrimen: Winning the deal is not winning the story

The ribbon cutting is the midpoint, not the ending.

Site selection coverage treats the announcement as the finish line, because trade press is paid to chronicle deals. Residents treat it as the starting gun for a different set of questions: what did we pay, what do we get, who checked the math, what happens if the jobs never arrive. The Upjohn Institute research on incentive costs, built over decades by economist Timothy Bartik, keeps finding that incentives tip a minority of location decisions, which means the public argument about value is not noise around your deal. For most deals, it is the deal, politically speaking.

So an agency fluent only in announcement choreography is half an agency. You need the firm that plans the second hundred days with the same care as the first press release: the first jobs report, the first construction milestone, the first sceptical editorial, the first anniversary audit.

Ask candidates to walk you through a deal that turned unpopular after announcement. Their answer will tell you whether they have ever actually done this work.

II Machina: Secrecy has a half life, and it is short

Every confidential project file becomes public on a schedule you do not control.

Project code names, nondisclosure agreements and executive sessions are legitimate tools while a company is deciding. But the HQ2 record, documented in legal scholarship on the bidding process, shows how completely the secrecy apparatus eventually surfaced: proposals were obtained through public records requests, redactions were litigated, and the hidden figures became the story that outlived the announcement. Good Jobs First has tracked subsidy deals for years and built its Subsidy Tracker on exactly this pattern, that the terms emerge, and they emerge on the least convenient day.

The mechanism is simple. The larger the incentive, the larger the constituency for disclosure, and disclosure delayed is disclosure weaponised. Your agency must therefore write every confidential document as a future public document. The memo you send the board in March is the exhibit the newspaper prints in November.

Test this directly. Ask a candidate firm how it drafts under an NDA it expects to expire into a records release. The firms that describe tone, restraint and paper discipline understand. The firms that promise airtight secrecy are promising something the calendar will not let them keep.

There is a practical corollary your board should hear plainly. Route candour to conversation and keep documents factual. The strategy debate your board needs, about how much the community can afford to offer, belongs in the room. The document trail should carry figures, drafts and decisions, each written in the level tone you would want read back to you in a deposition or a news story. An experienced agency polices this boundary daily, in small ways: it renames the file, softens the aside in the email, moves the speculation to a phone call. None of that is concealment. It is the ordinary hygiene of people who know which drawer the public eventually opens.

III Exemplum: The headquarters auction that taught everyone the lesson

One example carries the whole argument, and your board already knows it.

Amazon asked for proposals promising up to 50,000 jobs and a five billion dollar investment, and 238 jurisdictions competed. Many bids routed through private entities to shield them from open records law. Finalists signed nondisclosure agreements. New York and Northern Virginia won with packages reported at more than two billion dollars in combined incentives, and within months the New York half was abandoned after sustained political opposition, while the Virginia half proceeded with comparatively little damage.

Read the two outcomes carefully, because they are the lesson. Virginia engaged its legislature early, published its terms, and built a public case around workforce investment. New York's deal was negotiated quietly and announced as a finished fact, and it died as one. The difference was not the money. The difference was the order of operations: who heard the argument, and in what sequence.

An agency for an economic development organization must be able to narrate that sequence from memory and apply it to a warehouse deal in your county. If the HQ2 story is new to them, they are new to your problems.

IV Damnum: The number that hurts you is cost per job

Every incentive deal eventually gets divided by one number.

Journalists, opponents and eventually legislators will take your total package and divide it by promised jobs, then compare the result with deals in neighbouring states. That single quotient will headline the audit coverage, whether or not it captures the deal's real value in wages, capital investment and supply chain effects. The Mercatus Center analysis of the HQ2 finalist bids, which put average offers from finalist cities above two billion dollars, fed directly into this arithmetic, and it travelled further than any announcement release.

Your agency's job is to make sure the fuller ledger exists in public before the quotient hardens. Wage levels against county medians. Capital investment timelines. Clawback and performance terms, in plain language, while the deal is still popular. A firm that cannot explain your clawback provisions to a rotary club cannot defend them in a hearing.

Ask to see the fact sheet the firm would publish on announcement day. If it contains only celebration and no terms, you are looking at a firm that writes for day one and invoices you for day ninety.

V Genus: The firms that court economic developers

Each species is fluent in a different room.

Most economic development organizations need a hybrid, and the honest way to buy one is to name which room matters most in the next twenty four months. A pipeline full of contested deals argues for the public affairs spine. A talent shortage argues for place branding muscle. A firm that claims equal fluency in every room is describing its brochure, not its bench.

Notice also what none of these firms can do for you. None can make a bad deal good in public. The agency decision sits downstream of deal discipline, and a firm willing to say that out loud in the pitch is worth more than one promising to handle the politics later.

VI Auditus: You serve three audiences that distrust each other

The company, the legislature and the neighbourhood read the same release differently.

To the expanding company, your communications are evidence of competence: this community can deliver permits, workforce and discretion. To elected officials, they are armour: material a representative can quote when the deal is questioned at a town hall. To residents, they are a claim on their money, to be audited against the construction fence and the hiring hall. The International Economic Development Council trains practitioners for the first audience fluently. The third audience is where deals now go to die.

An agency earns its keep by writing one factual core that survives all three readings without alteration. The jobs figure the company quotes in its release must be the figure the mayor defends and the figure the resident checks. Any daylight between those three versions becomes the story, and it is always a story about honesty rather than arithmetic.

Ask candidates how they keep a single source of truth across a deal's life. You are listening for process: one approved fact sheet, version discipline, a named keeper. Improvised answers mean the versions have already diverged in other clients' deals.

Consider also the audience nobody puts in the pitch deck: the companies that chose somewhere else. Site selectors keep notes, and the way a community handles a contested win, or a public loss, is part of the record the next prospect reads. A community whose leadership defended its deal with documents, thanked its critics for specific questions and reported its numbers on time looks governable. That reputation is an economic development asset of the first order, and your agency either builds it deliberately or spends it accidentally. Ask the firm whether it has ever advised a client on losing gracefully. The pause before the answer is data.

VII Occasio: The announcement window closes in about a week

Momentum is perishable, and opposition organises on weekends too.

In the first days after an announcement, coverage is factual and the voices are official. By the second week, the story belongs to whoever has done the arithmetic and whoever can find an affected neighbour. Site Selection and the business press will move on to the next deal. Your local argument continues for the life of the incentive, which may be fifteen years.

This is why the agency's first deliverable should be a calendar, not a release. Day one terms sheet. Day three employer interview availability. Week two workforce partner voices. Month six construction update. Year one jobs verification, published whether the number is flattering or not. The Bartik research tradition and the Good Jobs First accountability work agree on one practical point from opposite directions: deals that report their own performance keep their legitimacy, and deals that go quiet invite other people to do the reporting.

A firm that proposes to measure success by announcement day clip volume is measuring the week it performs best. Insist on the fifteen year view, scaled to your typical deal term.

The calendar has one more use, and it is internal. Boards and elected officials rotate, and the officials who inherit your deal in year four did not sit through the negotiation. A published record of terms, promises and interim performance is the only briefing they will reliably get. Your agency's calendar is therefore also an institutional memory device. The firm that builds it is protecting future boards from relitigating settled facts, and protecting the deal from the amnesia of the people who must defend it next.

VIII Consilium: Score the finalists on the deals they survived

Longevity in this niche is the credential.

Give finalists a live exercise. Present a fictional deal: a logistics employer, a package worth a defined sum, a jobs pledge with a wage floor, and one organised opposition group with a competent spokesperson. Ask for the first week communication plan and the year one verification plan. The spread between firms will be wider on this exercise than on any credential presentation, and it will map precisely onto the spread in real performance.

Weight the year one plan as heavily as the week one plan. Anybody can rent enthusiasm for a launch. Staying accurate and present at the verification is the rarer virtue, and the one your board will remember.

Frequently asked questions

Should incentive terms be published at announcement?

In most cases yes, and the HQ2 experience is the standing argument. Terms published by you, in context, on announcement day are a policy choice. Terms extracted later by records request are a scandal frame. There are narrow exceptions during live negotiation, but the default should be disclosure with explanation.

How do we communicate while a project is still confidential?

Carefully and thinly. You can describe your pipeline, your target industries and your process without confirming any company's interest. An agency should help you build that general material in quiet periods so that nobody has to improvise near the truth during a live deal.

What is a clawback, and why does it belong in our press material?

A clawback is a contractual remedy that recovers incentives when a company misses its jobs or investment commitments. It belongs in your public material because it is the single strongest answer to the charge that the public wrote a blank cheque. If your deals lack clawbacks, fix the deals before you fix the messaging.

Can an agency help us win a competitive site selection?

At the margins, yes. Agencies can sharpen your proposal narrative, prepare your team for site visits and make your community's evidence easier to absorb. They cannot overcome workforce, logistics or cost fundamentals, and a firm that suggests otherwise is selling you the part of the process it cannot influence.

How should we handle opposition from residents or advocacy groups?

Early, factually and without theatre. Meet critics before the vote where possible, publish the terms they are citing, and correct arithmetic errors with documents rather than adjectives. Opposition that has been heard tends to argue about the deal. Opposition that has been ignored argues about your legitimacy.

What metrics should our board actually watch?

Deal performance against pledges: jobs verified, wages against the promised floor, capital invested, and cost per job as reported by you before others compute it for you. On the communications side, track the accuracy of coverage on terms, not the volume of clips. A board that watches accuracy gets a different agency performance than a board that watches applause.

Do small and rural organizations need the same approach?

The discipline scales down better than the budget does. A small organization cannot buy a large retainer, but it can buy the same documents: a terms fact sheet habit, a verification calendar, a single source of truth. Buy those as defined projects if a retainer is out of reach.

How this guide was built

This guide is built from published material on the HQ2 competition and incentive accountability, including legal scholarship on the bidding process, Mercatus Center analysis of finalist offers, Upjohn Institute research on incentive costs, Good Jobs First tracking, and IEDC and ACCE professional resources, all listed below. It presents no original deal data and quotes no agency pricing, because scope and region move those numbers too much for a responsible average. Its limitation is real: incentive law, disclosure practice and political culture differ sharply by state, and your state's rules govern your calendar before any guide does.

IX Incipe: Hire for the verification, not the unveiling

The decision reduces to one test. Which firm will still be accurate, present and useful when the jobs number is checked in public, three budgets from now?

Frontier Sectors is built for that longer argument: terms published plainly, performance reported on schedule, one factual core for the company, the legislature and the neighbourhood. If your organization is shortlisting firms, bring the deal you expect to defend hardest, redacted as needed, and judge the week one and year one plans side by side. Begin at https://sectors.frontiercapitals.com/start-a-campaign/ or call 401-219-4207, and we will start with the arithmetic your critics will use.

Sources

1. Chasing Smokestacks in the Dark, The Amazon HQ2 Quest Revives Debate Over Economic Development Secrecy, Journal of Corporation Law research via ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/347551946_Chasing_Smokestacks_in_the_Dark_The_Amazon_HQ2_Quest_Revives_Debate_Over_Economic_Development_Secrecy/fulltext/5fe6da3ca6fdccdcb800b40a/Chasing-Smokestacks-in-the-Dark-The-Amazon-HQ2-Quest-Revives-Debate-Over-Economic-Development-Secrecy.pdf 2. Free and Fair Markets Initiative, Amazon's Secretive HQ2 Deal Was an Affront to Taxpayers. https://freeandfairmarketsinitiative.org/press-release/amazons-secretive-hq2-deal-was-an-affront-to-taxpayers/ 3. The Heartland Institute, Virginia and New York Snag Amazon's HQ2 for 2 Billion, summarising Mercatus Center bid analysis. https://heartland.org/?p=27796 4. W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, Timothy Bartik incentive research. https://www.upjohn.org/ 5. Good Jobs First, Subsidy Tracker and incentive accountability research. https://www.goodjobsfirst.org/ 6. International Economic Development Council. https://iedc.org/ 7. ACCE, Chambers of Commerce definition and sector data. https://secure.acce.org/pages/chambers/ 8. Site Selection Magazine. https://siteselection.com/ 9. Tax Foundation, incentives and state tax policy research. https://taxfoundation.org/ 10. Brookings Institution, metropolitan and economic development research. https://www.brookings.edu/