Plan

Discover how we mapped out our course to set sail

Goal and objectives

Before we could set sail, we needed to plan out our course. Our Chapter and our teams dived deep to define our regional conference's purpose and what we wanted to accomplish.

Our goal was to provide professional development opportunities to public relations students and highlight the vast reaches and sea of possibilities available in the industry. Specifically, our objectives were:

To increase a sense of pride and community among our member by 10 percent by May 2017
To increase positive perceptions of SDSU's legacy PR program and our Chapter to the southwest region by 10 percent by May 2017
To increase our Chapter's membership by 15 percent by fall 2017

Once we mapped out our course, we were ready to explore the seas and #DiveIn!

Target publics

We planned to explore a vast range of topics and opportunities through our regional conference. Due to its interdisciplinary nature, our teams focused on reeling in three specific publics: PRSSA members, journalism and media studies students and PR students. Additionally, our campaign team formed strategies to move latent into aware audiences, and aware into active audiences.

PRSSA members
The campaign team encouraged aware PRSSA members in the surrounding Southwest region to attend our conference because we knew they have similar interests and professional needs. The team planned to highlight the opportunities that await PRSSA members in America's Finest City.

JMS students
The School of Journalism and Media Studies at SDSU offers a bachelor's degree in journalism with the option to emphasize in journalism, advertising, media studies or PR. These professions have transferrable skills such as media writing, building relationships, creating campaign strategies and establishing credibility. Due to these disciplines' overlapping principles, our campaign team aimed to educate latent non-PR students within the JMS program and provide them with knowledge and opportunities available at our regional conference. Additionally, JMS students are a pool of potential PRSSA SDSU members.

PR students
Public relations students from SDSU or a neighboring university are one step away from becoming an active audience and experiencing the benefits PRSSA has to offer. Our campaign team targeted PR students from across the region to explore the sea of public relations. The team aimed to educate this latent audience and turn them into an aware and active audience by highlighting the benefits our Chapter provides to our members and SDSU's legacy PR program.

Strategies and tactics

Engagement
To generate engagement, the team reached out to various organizations and firms around San Diego County for support. Through this strategy, our target audiences were able to connect with San Diego's PR community.

Promotion
By promoting the conference through social media, email, word of mouth, ad placements and media pitching, the campaign team increased knowledge among target audiences and raised registration rates and engagement.

Cohesive Branding
Implementing strong and cohesive branding throughout the campaign established a clear identity and distinguished our event from our competitors. This strategy was used to make the conference easily identifiable and ensure that our target audiences understood what our conference represented.

Main tactic: Social media

The campaign team chose to employ social media as a tactic to encompass all strategies.

Engagement: Social media increases engagement through the sharing, liking and retweeting of posts. This increased impressions of conference information, key messaging and our Chapter's reach.
Promotion: Social media turns audiences into aware and active audiences. A Coupofy survey of 2,000 millennials aged 18-34 revealed that 40 percent actively check and update their social network sites first thing in the morning. With this data, the team distributed information on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook between 9 a.m. and noon.
Cohesive branding: The campaign team incorporated oceanic language and branded graphics to maintain the conference's branding. Additionally, the team used two conference hashtags, #PRSSAinSD and #DiveIn, to track engagement and make the brand easily identifiable on social media.

The team decided to utilize our Chapter's existing Facebook and Instagram accounts to target PRSSA members and JMS students. However, the team created a unique regional conference Twitter account, @PRSSAinSD, so attendees could receive information exclusively about the conference and follow the team's live tweets during the event.

Key messaging

As the team got ready to set sail, they decided on three key messages that would continue to guide them throughout the campaign's course.

Explore the sea of public relations opportunities that await you in America's Finest City. By attending PRSSA SDSU's regional conference, students are exposed to award-winning agencies, world-famous hotels and tourist attractions, professional sports teams and prominent military bases.
Turn the tide in your public relations career. By attending Network Night and our conference, students will build relationships with local professionals and dive deeper into multiple industries -- making a significant impact in their careers.
Learn from public relations pioneers that make waves in their industry. SDSU is one of the top-10 PR programs in the nation and has faculty that actively contributes to the industry outside the classroom.