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Tuesday, April 28, 2020

Ashland University PRSSA students receive Honorable Mention in national Bateman Case Study Competition

The National Public Relations Student Society of America (PRSSA) organization announced the finalists and honorable mention entries for the 2020 Bateman Case Study Competition on Tuesday, April 24. This national competition centers around designing, developing, implementing and evaluating a major public relations campaign for a real world client. The client this year was the US Census Bureau and student campaigns focused on ensuring that key publics are counted, counted only once, and counted in the correct place for the 2020 Census. 

For the first time ever, an Ashland University team was selected to receive an honorable mention accomodation for their CountAUIn campaign. Less than 25% of all campaign submissions for this national competition are selected for recognition by the 34 judge panel, with the top three finalists competing for a scholarship. This year's honorable mention accomodations represented 14 colleges and universities across the United States and included Ashland University, Syracuse University, DePaul University,  Eastern Illinois University, Washington State University, Kent State and Ohio University among others.  

Every Bateman competition team was tasked with understanding and reaching undergraduate students at their academic institution with key campaign messaging, and then selecting a second public to focus on based on demographic and psychographic information about their community population. The CountAUIn team selected Ashland County Amish and Old Order Mennonite residents as their second public for this campaign after careful primary and secondary research of these segments. To reach campaign objectives, a variety of strategies and tactics to engage AU students were utilized including coffee sleeve advertising, pledge cards, radio and newspaper articles, free promotional pens, tabling events, and an interactive and informational Instagram account. To reach the Amish and Old Order Mennonite population of Ashland County, a group without technology, the campaign utilized two-step theory to focus on building relationships with community opinion leaders, sending out informational letters to the houses of Amish and Old Order Mennonite residents living in Ashland County, and posting info-graphics about the census in community areas frequented by this public.The CountAUIn campaign met, and exceeded, the overarching goal as well as the specific objectives of the campaign due to strategic research, planning, careful execution of the strategies and tactics, and implementation of crisis management contingency planning due to the COVID-19 disruptions. The campaign reached 79% of the Amish and Old Order Mennonite population in Ashland, Ohio and 49% of the Ashland University’s undergraduate population with key messages and engagement opportunities.

Public Relations and Strategic Communication students involved on the campaign team included: Juliet Touma, Rachel Miller, Michaela Godfrey, Samantha Reffner, Kathleen McKay and advisor Shawn Orr.