How do you take a small PR budget and turn it into big results?
Check out this scenario:
- Challenge: Create awareness of a small, private Bay Area for-profit school using only news coverage.
- Solution: Tie the school to Silicon Valley industry concerns – the need for engineers and a lack of diversity in engineering. Identify a time element for the story. Provide compelling visuals.
Our client’s schools pioneered a Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM)-based curriculum for preschool through eighth grade. We also have been closely monitoring media coverage about the lack of young women pursuing engineering careers. We worked with our client to create a national Op-Ed article about ways to stem the sharp drop-off of female students interested in engineering careers. We identified a national event called Engineers Week to provide a time element to the story: DiscoverE’s National Engineers Week.
We distributed a news release highlighting how the school’s students would spend more than 20,000 hours learning about engineering during the week. We also provided examples of compelling visuals, like students constructing models of their vision for “the city of the future,” teams of elementary students creating blood vessels using balloons and rubber bands, and more.
- Result? Our PR team created numerous newspaper and trade magazine articles, TV news segments and talk radio interviews for a budget of less than $6,500.
To view the television placements: