Abatement dollars have to show what they abated.
STRIVE3 works downstream of the award. If your jurisdiction is spending settlement funds on prevention, naloxone access, stigma reduction, or treatment connection, we build the outreach infrastructure and document what the spending actually reached.
The audit comes first, so the baseline exists before the money moves.
Approved uses, and a public accounting
Settlement spending sits under two pressures at once. The money can only go to uses your agreement approves, and the spending is visible in a way most program budgets are not. Council meetings, local press, and advisory committees all ask the same question within the first year.
- Approved-use exhibit
- Your agreement lists the abatement uses the funds may be spent on. Public education, prevention, and connection-to-care activities generally appear among them. Confirm the exhibit that governs your own agreement before you rely on our reading of it.
- Annual visibility
- Expenditure reporting is often public, and prevention line items attract attention out of proportion to their size.
- No renewal to hide behind
- Unlike a grant cycle, settlement funds run for years. A weak first-year account of the outreach follows you through every subsequent allocation.
What we are, on an invoice
We are a communications and outreach contractor. Module 01 is a service-area assessment. Modules 02 through 04 are message development, localized production, and measurement reporting. None of it is treatment, none of it is lobbying, and none of it is a capital expense.
We are not grant writers and we do not pursue funds on your behalf. That distinction matters here, because it keeps our work inside the administrative and program-support categories your approved uses already contemplate.
Allowability is your counsel’s call, not ours. We provide scope language and deliverable descriptions in the form your finance office needs to make that determination.
Most settlement work is a prevention program, not an engagement program
This is the distinction that decides whether a measurement plan survives contact with your actual campaign. Naloxone awareness, safe storage, youth prevention, and stigma reduction do not produce a qualified referral. Nobody calls and screens eligible. We agree which track applies before the work starts.
Engagement track
Moves a person toward a service. Treatment access, crisis line promotion, care navigation. Measured in qualified referrals, enrollment conversion, and time to first tracked response.
Prevention and awareness track
Changes a behavior or a condition with no referral endpoint. Measured in priority segment reach, message recall against a defined baseline, distribution and uptake of the specific resource, and partner activation.
Cost per qualified referral is the wrong instrument for a fentanyl awareness campaign. We will say so rather than produce a number nobody can defend.
The system, by module
Four modules that run in sequence. Buy the first and decide from there.
- Module 01 — Reach Audit
- A map of your service area against where eligible people actually live, a baseline cost per qualified referral, and a message risk register. Three weeks. From $8,500.
- Module 02 — Message System
- Audience-specific message architecture, safe-messaging review, and a production kit you keep. $22,000 to $34,000.
- Module 03 — Local Deployment
- Localized assets and partner activation across the service area, including Remote Studio production. $16,000 to $28,000 per jurisdiction per year.
- Module 04 — Measurement and Optimization
- Live dashboard, a monthly working session where budget moves toward what is producing referrals, quarterly narrative written in grant language, and an annual Outreach Evidence File. $1,500 to $2,800 per month.
Bundled first year: $58,000 to $86,000 for Modules 01 through 04. Smaller awards start at $24,000 to $32,000 using an existing regional campaign core. Media spend is separate and paid directly to platforms.
Public health communication under crisis conditions
Our published outcome cases are VA engagements, and we will not pretend otherwise. The closest analogue to settlement-funded prevention work in our portfolio is Mask Up, a public health campaign with no Veteran population and no referral endpoint.
Mask Up
Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center
What transfers from the VA work is method, not population: message testing before production, a service-area baseline before spend, and an outcome verified by someone other than us. Each case page states plainly what carries over and what does not.
“So did any of it work?”
- Asked in year one
- Usually by a board member or a reporter, using the total allocation rather than the outreach line. An answer built from invoices does not survive it.
- What we hand you
- An annual Outreach Evidence File: baseline, coverage against your jurisdiction, distribution and uptake, partner activation, and what changed quarter over quarter.
- Why the baseline matters
- Reach measured without a starting point is a number, not a finding. The audit establishes the starting point in three weeks, before the campaign exists.
Start with the map.
The Reach Audit takes three weeks and starts at $8,500. You get a map of your jurisdiction, a baseline, and a message risk register. It is yours whether or not you go further.
Victor Rogers, Founder and President
Reston, Virginia · info@strive3.com