Teaching PR

Yesterday I had a guest speaker, Stephanie Sparks of the Atlanta office of Ketchum, in my campaigns class to discuss client pitches. I've got five teams, two each competing on two accounts, Athens Canine Rescue and Bellew's Tours, plus the PRSSA Bateman Competition team which worked for the local Habitat for Humanity affiliate. The teams' presentations are scheduled for the end of this month, and until now they've been so focused on research and strategy that they hadn't put much thought into the actual presentation.

Stephanie is a former student of mine-- I rely on them a lot for input into what I teach, sample materials, guest lectures, etc.-- and I enjoyed seeing how much she's learned in 3 years at Ketchum. She showed them some examples of winning pitches (evidently they're on a hot streak these days), and talked about Ketchum's new business process.

I got another Grady grad, Nadine Randall, now working on the client side, to provide some comments about what clients are looking for in the presentation for the class blog (sorry, members only).

Here's hoping the students are getting fired up despite the onset of acute senioritis.

Update: more (and better) on this topic in a more recent post.

Labels: client pitch, public relations, students