I am Back!!!!

So I apologize for the length between blog posts. Last semester was crazy, so I was not very good at keeping the blog up to date. But, I wil be starting my last semester here at Chapman (ah!) so I figured it might me interesting to go through the job search process with me. Hopefully, by the time I graduate on May, I will have a job. *Crosses fingers* I am also taking one of our best classes, Entertainment Marketing this semester, so I am excited to share this experience with you all!

But first, let me wrap up last semester. I took what ended up being one of my favorite and most useful classes last semester, which was Public Relations Campaigns. This is the capstone for PR/AD majors, but you get to choose to do campaigns in either area. Since my interesting is in PR, that is what I went with.

The structure of the class is really cool. Everyone gets put into a group of five, and you choose a client. They have to be in an Orange County area non-profit area, but other than that you can choose any client you want. Our group chose the Laguna Playhouse, a theater located in Laguna Beach. The goal of the project is to create an entire PR campaign for the company, start to finish.

We started by interviewing the media director of the Playhouse, and got a good sense for where the company was lacking and where they could use extra help. Then we started step-by-step with the campaign. We had assignments due each week, some group and some individual. We went from research, to themes, goals, strategies and tactics, media strategies and evaluation. Our group created media tools like press release, brochures and newsletters that the Playhouse could actually use if they wanted.

The project ended with our group creating a 50-page book compiling all of the work we had done, and a thirty minute presentation. We were lucky enough to have our client there at our presentation, so it was like we were really pitching our campaign! In addition, our group is actually going down to the Playhouse to do our presentation for the marketing team of the Playhouse soon.

This was not another class assignment, I felt like I learned so much about what a PR campaign is, and how to pitch to a client. Some of our ideas may even be implimented, which is really exciting. I now have this beautiful book to show for my portfolio, and the experience to talk about.

That is why I love Chapman. It is so hands on and class projects are actually applicable to real life situations. Let me know if you have any questions or want to know more about this class or others. I will go into my “get a job when I graduate” strategy in the next post.

Thanks for reading:)