Peter Mattis is President of the The Jamestown Foundation. Over his career, he has shaped U.S. government decision-making in various forms: as a counterintelligence analyst in the Central Intelligence Agency, as Director for Intelligence at the Special Competitive Studies Project, and as Senior Fellow with a U.S. House Select Committee.
We’ve worked with Peter and his team since August 2024, advising on their positioning and broader brand strategy, and building their visual identity and website.
Tom: What has it been like working with us?
Peter: There was a genuine desire from the Cast from Clay team to understand what we did, and that manifested itself in the longer-than-scheduled interviews with people involved with the organisation, trying to understand who we were inside, who our board members thought we were, who our audiences thought we were, why they stayed engaged. It was as close to a 360-degree look at what we were as you could get.
These were structured interviews, done repeatedly. A lot of the way that Jamestown now presents itself came out of those conversations—certainly the words that I choose to use, some of the words that we learned to use, some of the ways we brought clarity to who we are internally and to our internal language.
It was the promise of a process, one that was rigorous, and that process delivered what was promised. Even if we had stopped after the interviews, every dollar that we paid for the stakeholder interviews would have been a worthwhile investment because of what it gave us, the questions that were asked, and the conversations that ensued.
Tom: How were you thinking about what needed to be done when you hired us?
Peter: We knew we had a stomach ache, but we didn’t have a diagnosis. We knew what our assets were, and we knew what our problems were, but we didn’t know why.
It’s like, “Oh, I have a stomach ache.” We knew we had a stomach ache, but was it an ulcer? Indigestion? Food poisoning? Stomach cancer? That’s what we didn’t know. That movement from a problem to a diagnosis was a critical element.
The second thing I knew we needed to address—and you and Natallia didn’t quite believe it—was that there are people who have been 10-year readers of China Brief or Eurasia Daily Monitor or Terrorism Monitor who don’t know that it’s published by Jamestown. You were like, “Oh, come on, that’s ridiculous”—and then you bumped into it while visiting Washington, DC.
It was a clear issue: things that have thousands of readers, millions in some cases, thousands of subscribers, could read something and know a publication title, but they wouldn’t know that it was us.
Tom: Were there any eureka moments as you went through the process?
Peter: You showed me, “Here’s your mission statement. And here’s CSIS’ mission statement. Here’s what it is at Brookings. Look how similar they all are. What do these words actually mean? What do you think an audience gets out of these different statements? Do they get anything?”
You and Natallia kept telling me, “Why don’t you just say that?” after I’d talked about what we do. We had been bouncing around it, but that was the moment.
It evolved by the end into something very clear: we help Americans and our allies understand our adversaries in their own words and in their own terms. It’s the simplest one-sentence statement of what Jamestown does.
Why hadn’t we been saying it like that? Sometimes you just need someone to say, “Just say it. Say the truth.”
Tom: What would you say to other leaders about the importance of running the positioning process themselves?
Peter: The leader has to own the branding process. You need to know what that process is, for no other reason than: would you get a suit tailored for you without going into the tailor?
Maybe if they’ve been your tailor for 20 years and have your measurements on file, you say, ”Yeah, just give me something in the super 130s.” But unless it’s that, you’ve got to own it, because it is essentially the suit that you are going to be wearing, that your organisation is going to be wearing, and that your staff is going to wear. For the branding to be effective, everyone—especially the leader—has to own it.
Tom: Have you noticed a difference in how people engage with you because of the work?
Peter: There have been a few calls from people in policy circles saying Jamestown is relevant again in a way that it wasn’t, realising that we might be the last one standing covering this issue or that one. I don’t think that would have happened if we hadn’t revisited and modernised how we looked, how we presented ourselves, and how we made our materials accessible.
The number of comments we’ve received from readers—“that piece was really good”— has gone up. Our website traffic has also gone up. Between November 2024 and November 2025 we had roughly 1.2 million visitors to the website. By not even the end of March 2026 we had surpassed 1.5 million website views. There’s been a very clear change.
Tom: What would you say to someone thinking about working with us?
Peter: You get back what you put in. Take the questions seriously, take the decision seriously, work through them. If you don’t like something at the beginning, just say it.
It wasn’t just the importance of getting to “why”—it’s that, as our two teams were getting to the importance of why, it brought your team and ours into alignment on what Jamestown is, why Jamestown is, and what Jamestown does.
So when we said we didn’t like something and it was a feeling of “this doesn’t feel right,” your team could say, “maybe it doesn’t feel right because it does this thing.” You had enough of an understanding of us to explain those things—but only because we focused on those early questions and conversations about who we are and why we are what we are.
If you don’t invest in that part, it can’t work. Otherwise, why are you doing a bespoke suit? Just go get it off the rack.
If you want to read another review, the next is with Rowan Emslie, Chief Communications Officer at the Centre for Future Generations. If you would like to have an initial conversation with Tom, our CEO, to discuss a potential engagement, you can book a 15 minute call.