Doing a Lot with a Little
My Public Service Communication course brought me a new challenge this semester: creating a public service campaign. My group was given the task of doing a lot, with very little.
Our client, Youth Outreach Services, asked us to create a campaign to recruit mentors for their new youth mentoring program in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago. Because YOS is a nonprofit, our campaigns were to be created with a very small budget; thus we had to be creative in our strategies. Aside from several creative tactics, my group believed that building relationships with the right groups of people would be the best way to gain support of the organization and the program.
This project (which I believe we did a great job on!) really reiterated the importance of building relationships, no matter what type of campaign you are working on. If you can build and maintain relationships with the right group of people, you gain valuable resources and connections that money certainly cannot buy. These relationships, in order to be most effective, must be sincere and meaningful for both parties involved.
The importance of building relationships has been repeatedly emphasized to me as one of the fundamentals of the PR industry. But there isn’t a how-to guide on effective relationship building. (I mean, I’m sure there is…but who gets to claim expertise on such a topic?) Or maybe I’m wrong. Is there?
Filed under: Public Relations | 1 Comment
Tags: public service campaigns, Relationship building, Youth Outreach Services
There definitely ISN’T a guide to building relationships! And Maggie doll, I hear what you’re saying; this has been one of my recent struggles as I try to crack my way into the networking and relationship building part of the public relations world. I am also just finishing up my public service communications course, and my group worked with an animal assisted therapy nonprofit organization called Canine Motivated Therapies. We definitely struggled at the beginning, trying to figure out how to create different documents on virtually no budget, create a social media campaign, and create partnerships with other organizations in the Chicagoland area.
I can tell you that the one thing that I have found to be an integral part of our success is the old proverb “Kill ‘em with kindness.” While it sounds kind of silly and simple, being nice and open to opinions from any and everyone is the best way to form relationships in my opinion. Being nice and a good listener is the easiest way to gain people’s trust, and therefore possibly gain a future relationship with them. I know that being sugary sweet to the point of being obnoxious is also the fastes way to repel someone, but finding an in between is important, and will probably help any PR professional go far.