1) Oakwood College had never undertaken a comprehensive campus master plan or had new building construction in 10 years and sought to signal a change with ambitious $84 million expansion plans. 2) The PR department secured a meeting with the local newspaper's editorial board to announce the plans, knowing this would provide a strong third-party endorsement. 3) The announcement was well-covered by the newspaper and local news, successfully launching the campaign and increasing the profile and influence of the PR department at the college.

1. (Case study published in Public Relations and the Presidency: Strategies and
Tactics for Effective Communications CASE book, by John E. Ross and Carol P.
Halstead, July 2001)
#10. Campus Case: PR’s Role in a New Master Plan at Oakwood
College
By Tim Allston, APR, Executive Director of Public Relations, Oakwood College
“Ensuring the successful launch of the college’s ambitious plans required our public relations
staff to signal a new way of thinking as well.”
The challenge
Just call us the “Never Had It Before College. In its 103-year history, Oakwood College
had never had a comprehensive campus master plan, or any change in its educational status since
its accreditation as a senior college in 1958, or any new building construction in 10 years. It had
never even experienced a newspaper editorial board briefing.
What’s more, since its founding in 1896, the college had maintained a posture of relative
isolation from its bustling space-industry-driven community in Huntsville, Alabama.
The year 1999 was a time of major change for Oakwood, a historically black liberal arts
Seventh-day Adventist college. Leading the movement was Delbert W. Baker, OC’s 46-year-old
magazine editor-turned-college president, and his President’s Council—a seven-member
management team that included me, representing public relations.
Together we choreographed several big events that signaled a new day at OC. These events
included the kick-off of our 20-year, $84 million master plan program, construction of a new
$3.5-million, 40,000-square-foot business and technology complex; and the announcement of
our new status as Oakwood Adventist University, a change scheduled to become official on July
1, 2003. For all this, a local media scoop served as the launch pad.
The solution
Ensuring the successful launch of OC’s ambitious plans required our public relations staff to
signal a new way of thinking. We started by collaborating closely with President Baker and
the rest of his management team. Contrary to most higher ed hierarchies where PR reports to the
development and advancement operations, Baker chose instead to have PR—the unit most
responsible for the college~ image building and internal and external information
dissemination—not only report directly to him, but also serve on his senior management team,
the President’s Council. These steps signaled a move on president’s part to prioritize public
relations and were crucial to establishing the influence PR would have in the roll-out of the
master plan.
As a council member, I convinced the president and my council colleagues that an editorial

2. briefing with the local paper was the best way to launch our multi-year, multimillion-dollar
campaign. I told them that the very nature of the newspaper announcement would automatically
give the campaign a third-party endorsement, much stronger and more broad-based than
anything we could report about ourselves. Any follow-up ‘copycat’ coverage such as TV
interviews and magazine placements would both deepen the third-party endorsements and extend
the story’s shelf life.
To bring our strategies to life, we had to put four key elements in place:
1. Issues management, which we defined as proactively anticipating, identifying, evaluating,
and responding to public issues and concerns that affect OC and its publics. Among the primary
opportunities and messages we wanted to control and promote:
- Our project leadership for the campus master plan was made up of a unique joint
venture between a 32-year-old local architectural firm headed by a white woman and a
2-year-old Columbus, Ohio, architectural firm headed by a black man.
- Our letting construction contracts locally would have a positive economic impact.
- We were going to start actual daily Phase I construction on our anchor facility after a
groundbreaking ceremony bound to attract media attention.
- Our new facility’s scheduled completion was set to coincide with our upcoming
Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ 10-year reaccredidation visit.
- We had a strong process and rationale behind moving to university status.
2. Spokesperson training and counseling. From these issues we developed what I called
SOCOs (Single Overriding Communications Objectives) or talking points. Pronounced “sock-
ohs,” these were the main messages that we wanted our master-plan experts to convey. The
experts were our president; our financial affairs VP, who also served as building committee
chairman; the executive director of our information technology division, who was also our
master plan coordinator; the president of Huntsville’s Jones & Herrin architectural firm; and the
president and founder of Harris Design Services in Ohio.
To help these main spokespersons stay on message, I shifted roles from rainmaker to media
trainer. I had been trained as a media/speaker trainter in previous employment as account
executive at the PR mega-firms Burson-Marsteller and Hill and Knowlton, and I called on that
experience in training our master-plan experts.
3. Media relations. For the college’s first editorial briefing, I employed a “kill a fly with a
sledgehammer” strategy. The technique meant:
- avoiding the temptation of a press conference, choosing instead to allow the lone daily paper,
The Huntsville Times, to get the scoop;
- arranging OC’s first-ever editorial board briefing, the seed of which was planted with the
Times’ managing editor upon my arrival 15 months earlier;
- overloading the briefing with several hard- and soft-news stories or angles, along with well-
illustrated building sketches and landscape maps; and
- making President Baker available for follow-up TV coverage.
4. Smart timing. In the Public Relations Society of America’s Code of Professional Standards

3. for the Practice of Public Relations, Article No. 9 states, “A member shall not guarantee the
achievement of specified results beyond the member’s direct control.” I could not and would not
guarantee anything to my president, my principals, or the Huntsville Times —anything other than
erecting the bridge to connect them. Yet I tried in every conceivable way to structure this event
for success. That meant:
- making sure that actual construction was to begin in a week, as contracts were finalized on
December 21;
- having all principals rehearsed and confirmed to be at the briefing; and
- most important, scheduling the briefing so that it and its subsequent news coverage
would take place during the 1999 Christmas holiday season, when any competing educational
entities (public and higher ed) would be inactive and the media would be hungry for non-holiday,
non-Y2K stories. In short, Oakwood needed this announcement and media coverage to work for
it even as the college was vacationing!
The results
Outcomes exceeded our most far-flung expectations. The December 23 Huntsville Times
proclaimed “Oakwood Sets $84M Expansion with a front page, above-the-fold story with full-
color photos of the business complex sketch and the master plan landscape map. The Times
followed up three days later, on a Sunday, with a lead editorial titled “Open for Business.” The
local ABC-TV affiliate made us its second lead story on its 5, 6,and 10p.m. broadcast, the latter
segment featuring a cozy at-home interview with the president.
To extend the story s shelf life, I sent the Times articles to Southern Tidings, our region s
denominational magazine, which has 65,000-plus readers every month. The magazine then asked
me to prepare a spiritually focused story treatment. The resulting feature and additional photos
ran as the April 2000 cover story—including a computer-generated “Oakwood Adventist
University” main entrance gate sign. I then reprinted the original Times article and Southern
Tidings cover feature as colorful stand-alone collateral materials to use both for general
promotion as well as for lead master plan campaign fund-raising pieces.
How fast can you say “win-win”? By the time our launch was complete, the college wasn’t the
only entity with a higher profile. Our PR office was also well positioned in several ways. We
became an increasingly important voice on the President’s Council. We forged an even closer tie
with our hometowns economic and social landscape. The local media, led by the Times, began
paying closer, more rapt attention to our news releases—ever awaiting a next “scoop.”
Perhaps most important, PR was in an excellent position to play a strategic role in OC’s ongoing
efforts to become the “Better Than Ever College.”