Looking for clients for my "PR for Nonprofits" class!

I'll be teaching "Public Relations for Nonprofit Organizations" this fall and am looking for two nonprofit organizations in the Austin area that would be interested in working with my students during the fall semester! This class is a service-learning course which allows students to gain valuable hands-on PR experience while simultaneously helping out a local nonprofit.

As part of the class, students will take on a local nonprofit as a client and provide PR counsel to that organization. Students will meet with representatives from the nonprofit to find out more about the organization and to identify a PR problem or opportunity (this could be any PR related issue such as increasing awareness among a particular public about what your organization does; attracting more volunteers, etc.). Based on their interactions with the client and on research conducted by the students, they then develop a comprehensive plan for a PR campaign which states their goals and objectives for the campaign, identifies key publics and messages, and describes the best strategies and tactics to reach their stated goal(s). At the end of the semester, students present their campaign proposal to the class and the client.

If you are interested in working with our class on this exciting project, or if you know of a nonprofit organization that could use our services, please contact me. I'm looking forward to hearing from you!

For further info on the class, I have attached the syllabus:

Who controls your online identity? Study suggests it may not be you.

Here's a summary of a study I discussed in my Interpersonal Communication class last week. The study examined the question of whether or not our Facebook friends influence the way other people perceive us online. The findings indicate that on social networking sites, our friends may indeed participate in the construction of our online identities. In other words, we're not solely in control of constructing these identities anylonger. A fact which a lot of companies have had to come to terms with over the course of the past few years - especially with regards to accepting that they're not solely in control of their brands' idenitities anylonger.

View more presentations from Corinne . (tags: pr study)

Reference:
Walther, J. B., Van Der Heide, B., Kim, S. Y., Westerman, D., & Tong, S. T. (2008). The Role of Friends’ Appearance and Behavior on Evaluations of Individuals on Facebook: Are We Known by the Company We Keep? Human Communication Research, 34 (1), 28-49.

The history of public relations practice - A student project

My intro to PR class just finished its PR history project and since I've been trying out a brand-new assignment this semester, I thought I'd share the end product here. The assignment required each student to research a particular time period and to upload the findings into a digital timeline created on Dipity. Students had to write a short narrative to summarize each event and locate multimedia files (pictures, links, videos) that would illustrate those events. Each student was responsible for identifying at least 5 events within a given time period. 

The result is a pretty neat (okay, so I'm biased...) little timeline of the history of the PR profession which we will hopefully build on in future classes. We found out the hard way that Dipity doesn't allow for B.C. dates, so you'll need to excuse the ancient Greeks and Cicero showing up on the wrong date. Take a look, and if you like it, let them know - they've done a lot of work on this.