Most public agencies now operate under a standing directive to modernize. Boards tell communications staff to adopt AI, streamline workflows, and do more with a budget that isn’t growing. The instruction usually stops there. What lands on a comms director’s desk is “use more automation,” not a plan for what that means inside an agency that also has to think about public records requests, procurement rules, and a public that didn’t ask to be marketed to.
The response is often to shop for a platform. A district evaluates engagement software. A transit agency compares CRMs. The evaluation itself becomes the project, and it produces a decision about software rather than a decision about what the communications function should actually be doing differently. Somewhere in that sequence, the tool quietly became the strategy.
Tooling is a real part of the problem, worth saying plainly. Most agencies are running some combination of a decade-old website, a handful of platforms that overlap in ways nobody has audited, and at least one system nobody remembers why they bought. Knowing what’s actually useful, what’s redundant, and what the agency can run without outside help is a legitimate skill, and a necessary one. On its own, though, it isn’t leadership. A tool audit tells you what you own. Whether the communications function is doing what it needs to, who it’s actually reaching, and what changes if it starts working better are separate questions, ones a spreadsheet of licenses can’t answer.
How this actually gets hired
Washington doesn’t require most local governments to run a full competitive process for this kind of work. Cities, counties, school districts, and special purpose districts other than ports and public facilities districts set their own rules for what the state calls a personal services contract, a category built for bringing in outside expertise to solve a defined problem or complete a temporary project, not to run an ongoing department. Most agencies also keep a consultant roster with a dollar threshold below which they can skip competitive bidding entirely. For a district or a mid-size agency trying to close a specific gap in how it communicates, that’s a considerably lighter process than “government contracting” tends to sound.
Larger agencies are a different case. An organization the size of Sound Transit runs competitive procurement as standard practice, with board approval required on anything substantial. It also runs a Technical Assistance Program built specifically to help smaller firms understand and navigate that process, which functions as a real door in rather than a formality. Getting hired at that scale looks less like a single pitch and more like building a relationship with procurement staff well before there’s a specific opening to fill.
Leadership, not a longer contract
Agencies sometimes treat this kind of engagement as temporary staffing, someone to hold the seat until there’s budget or justification for a full-time hire. That framing undersells what a senior person can do inside a fixed window. What they actually contribute is judgment applied to a specific mandate: what the agency’s existing tools are for, what a three-person comms team can realistically own, and what changes once someone senior is accountable for the answer. Structured that way, the engagement tends to leave behind something that outlasts the contract, not just a report nobody reopens.
In practice, that means holding two things at once. One is a working knowledge of the marketplace: what a given automation platform genuinely does well, where it duplicates something the agency’s IT department already licenses, and where the honest answer is that the agency doesn’t need new software at all, it needs someone using what it already has correctly. The other is an understanding of what changes when the client is public money: claims that would be routine in a private-sector case study become public record, and vendor relationships carry conflict-of-interest rules private companies rarely think about. Working inside those constraints is a different skill from working around them, and it’s usually the one an outside vendor hasn’t had to develop.
None of this makes the tooling question irrelevant. It just changes where it sits. An agency that knows what its communications function is supposed to accomplish can evaluate a platform in an afternoon. Skip that step, and the platform decision gets made again in eighteen months, by whoever’s in the seat next, with the same uncertainty about what problem it was ever supposed to solve.