By Brooke Richards, 1910 PR Associate
When I was first asked to be a part of the Bateman Competition Team, I was surprised, excited, and scared. Being on the team, which involves planning, executing, and reviewing a public relations campaign, was new territory for me.
I am a transfer student, and this is my second semester as a public relations major. I felt extremely overwhelmed going into the first meeting and had no clue what to expect.
The Bateman Case Study Competition is a national case study through the Public Relations Student Society of America. The competition has a different sponsor every year, who acts as the client. This year's sponsor was the News Literacy Project. Teams throughout the nation research, plan, implement and evaluate a public relations campaign for the client.
We had six team members this year, and thankfully the nerves were eased once the team was introduced to each other.
We instantly fell into an atmosphere of comfort and camaraderie, and thankfully, I wasn’t the only one that felt in over my head. I soon learned that this was new to all of us. We leaned on each other for support. We brainstormed for hours on end, writing each other's ideas and plans on the whiteboard just to erase half of them 5 minutes after.
During the campaign, I was responsible for reserving spaces for us to promote to students in the student center. I have never had experience with event planning, and this was important to ensure we had specific times to do our jobs. Throughout the promotion, we would speak to students, hand out giveaways, and ask them to follow our Instagram account, which was a key factor in our campaign due to how easy it is to reach students and spread information.
I am immensely proud of the growth each team member made.
We all gained confidence in ourselves and each other and learned how to run a campaign as a team.