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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