Sustainability Week at BSU: Students and Faculty in Activist P.R.
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This presentation is for Sustainability Week 2013 at Bridgewater State College. It is a case study of how students in one online class – Writing for Public Relations – researched how other colleges communicate about sustainability before writing public relations deliverables for the BSU Center for Sustainability.
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Sustainability Week at BSU: Students and Faculty in Activist P.R.
- 1. ACTIVIST PUBLIC RELATIONS: BSU Students/Faculty in Action How to Create a Media Kit for University Sustainability Centers 2013 Sustainability Week Bridgewater State University This presentation is on Slideshare!
- 2. Goal: Public Value Create a Campus Sustainability Center Media Kit TACTIC: Nine steps of strategic writing Following class text: March, C., Guth, D., Short, B. (2012). Strategic Writing: Multimedia Writing for Public Relations, Advertising and More. Boston: Pearson.
- 3. The Strategic Writing Process 1. Research 2. Creativity/Brainstorming 3. Organizing/Outlining 4. Writing 5. Revision 6. Editing 7. Seeking Approval 8. Distribution 9. Evaluation
- 4. Step 1. RESEARCH SAMPLE FINDINGS: Social media used for college Sustainability Centers; Student ambassadors responsible for recruiting; Majors and minors in Sustainability Students studied social media and other online presences of college Sustainability Centers.
- 5. Refining the great ideas Step 2. Brainstorming Adding to team Google document Step 3. Organizing Outlining information for conference call
- 6. Step 4. Writing Media Pieces Fact sheet Introductory speech News releases (announcement, feature, social media) Brochure Cover letter Pitch Public service announcements Media advisory
- 7. Step 6. Editing Peer review of news releases and other deliverables
- 8. Step 7. Seeking Approval What could be hard about this step? Keep open mind Swallow pride Focus on strategic goal Politely debate
- 9. Step 8. Distribution Student-built websites to showcase strategic writing
- 10. Step 9. Evaluation Writing eval Did deliverables fulfill purpose? Reach targeted audiences? Distributed effectively Why? Why not? Team/self eval Strong, weak points Time management Recommendations for future
- 11. Questions? Thomasena Shaw: thomasena.Shaw@bridgew.edu Nancy Van Leuven: nancyvanleuven@gmail.com Rebecca McLaughlin: r2mclaughlin@gmail,com Alexandra Snow: alexmariesnow@gmail.com Stephanie Soares: S3soares13@gmail.com
Editor's Notes
- This presentation is for Sustainability Week 2013 at Bridgewater State College. It is a case study of how students in one online class – Writing for Public Relations – researched how other colleges communicate about sustainability before writing public relations deliverables for the BSU Center for Sustainability.
- We follow the nine steps of strategic writing in describing the student process.
- These are the foundationalsteps of strategic writing, a basic framework for all P.R. writing efforts.
- Using a basic comparative research analysis template, students researched the Sustainability Centers at different colleges across the country. Students focused on the online presence of these centers, and how they promote themselves in the campus community. Students found that many Sustainability Centers rely on social media sites and student-run organizations to promote sustainability awareness on campus.
- Google Drive turned out to be a great way for teams to keep in touch and stay up-to-date on projects. First, each student got a Gmail account to work together on the Google document. One person was administrator of the document and created it before inviting each member of the team to join in. Once we logged into Gmail, we could see a list of active documents and click on it to view, edit, or post new ideas. The main person was to brainstorm and develop our ideas. It was great to have an accessible workspace as a physical page for all the ideas to be mapped out.
- We wrote several types of media pieces for this project. A fact sheet describes the who, what, when, where, why, and how of a campaign or organization. A speech follows a structure of greeting the audience, capturing their attention, establishing credibility, and creating a strong call for action. The news release assignment included three forms of recruitment and publicity: Announcements for standard hard news outlets, features as human interest features, and social media news. Brochures focus on specific facts, such as a LEED building project, while cover letters are a one-page sales letter. A pitch persuades a journalist or blogger to write a specific story, while public service announcements are concise and brief messages often pre-recorded or read by announcers. Finally, a media advisory is used for extremely timely news or to remind a journalist of another important release.
- Students offered anonymous and constructive feedback on news releases. This feedback focused on all aspects of the news release: formatting, content, and grammar. Groups then chose the news releases that they felt would best satisfy the client.
- In the real world, students will have team members, bosses, and clients approve their work based on the contract and client expectations. For this class, they had rubrics and the class text to follow for format and content, then edits and final approval from the supervisor (instructor) and eventually your BSU client. The approval process is one that has many steps and requires an open mind, clear expectations, and sometimes a healthy debate. We used rubrics as guidelines, and then handed our work over to a teammate for advice and notes. We could then read over notes about specific writing pieces, such as news releases for the Center for Sustainability, and then edit. Once the work is polished, it is approved and we posted it to our individual websites.
- During the semester, student voted on the best news release to forward to the client. They also built personal websites to showcase all their individual work.
- In the evaluation step, students first worked on draft writing pieces and measured against rubrics. There were also frequent team collaborative efforts to determine best practices and team management.
- Please join us at activistpr.com or activistpublicrelations.com