Each year, the AEJMC Public Relations Division showcases our members’ service-learning and community-engaged learning pedagogical experiences. In 2023, we are highlighting the work of five members who are bringing real-world communications challenges into the classroom to enrich student learning and impact their communities. Here’s one of our featured stories, and mark your calendars for a virtual brown bag session with our featured members on April 20 at 1 p.m. ET.
Campaign Management (Capstone course for Public Relations & Advertising majors)
Dr. Breann Murphy | Jacksonville State University
Jacksonville State University (JSU) is a small-town campus full of Gamecock pride, with one of its nonprofit services being devoted to giving back to its community. The Gamecock Market is a campus initiative, comprised of JSU employees and student volunteers, that offers free services, such as food, clothing, hygiene products, and school supplies, to its own faculty, staff, and students in need. While this initiative continues to assist those who use this service, it was struggling to gain awareness and maintain a steady flow of donations. To help with this challenge, we collaborated with the Gamecock Market to serve as the client in our Department of Communication’s undergraduate campaign management course, which has quickly turned into a long-term client partnership.
In Fall 2022, the students were challenged with increasing awareness and engagement of the Gamecock Market on campus. To improve visibility, the students collaborated to immediately add a contact for the market on the university’s app and developed a redesign of the service’s webpage, which the client has already launched. It consists of a more relatable and accessible layout, including subtabs with updated information, staff profiles, and a new slogan to better reflect the Gamecock Market’s community-centric brand: “When JSU is home, we are family.” These developments have already led to an increase in student involvement with this service.
These students (Fall 2022) additionally created a campaign plan to increase student engagement with the Gamecock Market. For this, they developed a competition drive, deemed “Market Madness,” for student campus organizations to volunteer to compete to raise donations for the market each month during the academic year. For this campaign, these students developed flyers, social media content, competition guidelines, and campus contacts. The client intends to initiate this campaign next academic year (2023-2024) and has plans to develop a public relations internship for an undergraduate student to assist in implementing it.
During the Market Madness campaign development, this client asked to continue this partnership to help create a donor relations campaign to increase its visibility off-campus, and in the surrounding Jacksonville community, for additional monetary and item donations. Therefore, the students in campaign management this semester (Spring 2023) are working in two groups to develop community outreach plans for the Gamecock Market to develop short- and long-term donor relations with local businesses.
Throughout this academic year, one recognizable aspect of this client partnership has been how the students have truly valued creating campaigns that are rooted in service and community-engagement, since this work gives back to their own peers, community, and university. This hands-on experience has provided these students with a sense of pride in their work and demonstrates the impact of nonprofit collaborations, which has increased their passion for public relations and campaign development.
**Provided below are samples of the work that was created by the students in this course during Fall 2022 for the Market Madness campaign.
Redesign of client’s webpage:
Signup form to compete in Market Madness:
Social Media Promotion for Market Madness: