As I walked along the table-lined field showcasing all the organizations of Virginia Tech at Gobblerfest, the student activities fair, my freshman mind was bombarded with an overwhelming amount of opportunities. Where should I invest my time? What cause should I advocate for? Little did I know, that exactly one year from that September afternoon, I would be manning my own Gobblerfest table advocating for an organization that I had co-founded at Virginia Tech. Although it did not exist on our campus at the time, I heard about Nourish International through the PRSSA listserv. I offered to help do PR for them in order to brand Nourish on our campus, but the National Office had other things in mind: they asked me to help found the Virginia Tech Chapter and I responded with a resounding “yes!” After completing the application process and phone interview with the program director, I was welcomed into the Nourish family with open arms. For me, being given an opportunity to work towards meeting the basic necessities of human life in developing countries was a no-brainer. I believe every man, woman, and child has a right to a fighting chance at life. Since I am lucky enough to have the education and foundation that makes this endeavor possible, I am thrilled to play a role in this nationwide organization and be a part of Nourish’s biggest founding class to date (shout-out to Chapter Founders Class of 2013!). What’s unique about this student-run nonprofit is that it strives to make a long lasting impact on extreme poverty through investing in sustainable projects in destitute communities. Investments are funded by on-campus business ventures, such as our Band Together Venture. For this venture, we are selling a variety of colored elastic hair bands around Tech’s campus. After a full school year of running our business ventures, our chapter will then travel to a chosen destination the following summer and spend 6-8 weeks transforming our project from plans into a reality. For Summer 2014, Nourish International Virginia Tech plans to travel to Guatemala. While in Guatemala, we will partner with a local organization working to improve teaching methods in elementary schools, help citizens implement after school activities encouraging attendance, and teach citizens how to successfully grow a plentiful garden. This overview of Nourish International only provides a snapshot of the nonprofit’s entirety, but there are numerous integral aspects that keep this organization growing. One of these crucial features is none other than public relations. Without public relations efforts, the public will know nothing about your nonprofit. If the public knows nothing about the mission of your nonprofit, what you do, or what you advocate, I can guarantee they will be unwilling and unlikely to contribute their time or hard-earned cash towards said nonprofit. I quickly learned this alongside my co-founder, Katie Wells [pictured on Melissa's right at the Nourish International 2013 Summer Institute at UNC], as we worked to establish a general body membership, fill our executive board, and later reach out to the community of Blacksburg. If people don’t know or don’t understand what your organization is working towards, why should they care? This is where PR comes into play. Both Katie and I blew up social media with Nourish International related subjects, providing links to our mission and values as well as links to blogs written by students working abroad on previous Nourish projects. Through social media, we were able to generate interest from anyone of our Facebook friends who were scrolling through their newsfeed and stumbled across our posts. Using social media was our go-to strategy for the initial wave of PR to communicate our message to our targeted audience: Virginia Tech students. Building on this, we set up a table at the student activities fair, handed out flyers and pamphlets welcoming people to our interest meeting. For this phase of branding ourselves on campus, it was important that we had a convincing pitch perfected. The pitch had to be concise and pique an individual’s interest, all while conveying Nourish’s mission. This crucial PR element is what makes or breaks a nonprofit; it grabs people’s attention and influences them to buy into the nonprofit’s cause. After establishing a group of members, Katie and I then worked with our chapter to brand ourselves at Virginia Tech, differentiating Nourish from the other international development organizations on campus. We did this mainly through our Facebook page, giving followers updates about our latest ventures, linking them back to our mother website, and providing information about world poverty utilizing the emotional appeal, pathos. Using social media as a PR tool again, these tactics were all ways to inform our targeted audience about our endeavors and mission. Although we still have a ways to go before becoming a well-branded organization on Virginia Tech’s campus, our very first semester as a chartered club has proven to be successful thus far. Not only have we made a substantial amount of money in our business ventures, but we have also grown to 20 active members led by an executive board consisting of 8 incredibly talented students. I am eager to see how we will continue to flourish in the upcoming semesters, but it is obvious this will only be possible through the continued application on public relations. Edited by Melanie Ford, Webmaster and Editor-in-Chief 2013-2014
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A few weeks ago my grandmother sent me a friend request on Facebook. I am pretty sure I spent a solid 5 minutes just staring at the computer screen, willing the request to disappear back into the virtual world. As much as I love the woman and her fantastic apple pie making skills, I do not want her to be able to see my Facebook account…and the pictures of me from Halloween that come with it. Our parents’, and the occasional technology inclined grandparents’, generation has relentlessly latched on to Facebook and consequently caused our generation to begin to shy away from the social media service. So where did we flee to? Twitter. Twitter is something the “old-dogs” have yet to get their grubby paws on. Created in 2006 by four undergraduate students at New York University, Twitter is an online social networking and micro-blogging service; for all intents and purposes it is the “SMS of the Internet” (Wikipedia). Today there are over 550 million active Twitter accounts and an estimated 135,000 new users registering every day. Over 58 million tweets are made daily, with the service limiting each respective “tweet” to 140 characters. With that many tweets bombarding the virtual world, the million-dollar question is how do you stand out? In the beginning I was a hesitant Tweeter who only made an account because my friends pressured me into it. I honestly did not want one. I shared the view of Mr. Griffith, Emma Stone’s English teacher in the 2010 romantic comedy, Easy A: “I don’t know what your generation’s fascination is with documenting your every thought…but I can assure you, they’re not all diamonds. ‘Roman is having an OK day, and bought a Coke Zero at the gas station? Raise the roof.’ Who [cares]?” I did not see the amazing networking and overall professional growth potential Twitter had. Needless to say I popped the “disbelieving bubble” I was in rather quickly and in my short year and a half relationship with Twitter sent 1,706 tweets and from that received 168 followers, 683 re-tweets, and 1,126 favorites; not too shabby for a 19-year-old college student with a severely average life. My motto for Twitter is simple: keep it short and sweet. Yes, Twitter sets a 140 character limit already but I do not understand why some people feel the need to use all 140 just on principal. U.S. President Barack Obama, following his victory in last year’s presidential election, sent the most re-tweeted message in Twitter history. It simply read “Four more years.” and included a picture of him and his first lady embracing. Sometimes less is more. The Twittersphere does not need to be bombarded with unnecessary hoopla. Every time before I hit the daunting “Tweet” button a spinning wheel of “Will this get any likes? Will this get re-tweeted? Will I be ruthlessly judged for this opinion?” rolls through my mind. Here are a few tactics I use to keep my tweets in check: 1. K.I.S.S. – Keep it simple stupid. 2. Timing is key. It may seem silly but that time of day a message is tweeted severely affects its success (i.e. the likelihood of whether or not it gets re-tweeted or favorited). If I tweet about an event that I want to be publicized my best bet for the most amount of views is in the morning or the evening before a reasonable bed time--a 3 a.m. is not going to receive a lot of buzz. 3. Hashtags: good or bad? Great in moderation and terrible in excess. Do not be one of those girls who does 25 character hashtags (#omgbestboyfriendintheworld…just, why). 4. Tweeting images. I love attaching pictures and images to my tweets; people respond well to visuals. However, I would not recommend an image with every tweet. Twitter recently updated its format so that images can be viewed without having to be clicked on which I find extremely helpful. 5. Appropriateness. Will that tweet you just wrote set an angry, pitchfork-wielding mob after you (virtually or IRL)? Hopefully the answer is no. It is good to have opinions and not only express them but stand by them, but if a tweet has no other point than to bash or harm someone there’s no point in writing it. Voicing your opinions on animal abuse or tweeting a link to a fundraiser for those affected in the Philippines are the type of things our generation should be using the service for! Yes, I occasionally tweet about how amazing my Qdoba was or how my professor for x class sucks for assigning the class a last minute essay, but that’s not where the bulk of one’s time should be spent. 6. Work v. Pleasure. Every time you tweet something make sure you are ok with you boss five years from now seeing it because let’s be honest, technology can do amazing things and people are creepers; it could resurface when you do not want it to. Cliff notes of those bullets: Tweet about things you’re passionate about at times when you know people will be looking and KISS: keep it simple stupid. It’s as simple as one – two – twee(t). Edited by Melanie Ford, Webmaster and Editor-in-Chief 2013-2014 |
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