After a long slog at learning PR this year, MMU’s BA Advertising Management and Public Relations students completed their final lectures this week.
Final year students Lucy Owen, Deepika Sharma, Emma Lalley and Lauren Fishwick stopped in at the business school for a final seminar with PR Senior Lecturer Susan Kinnear.
Good luck in your exams ladies!! See you at graduation.
The BA Public Relations and Digital Communications Management level 5 (2nd year) students have been learning how to plan and implement a PR campaign. For their group assignment they had to devise a campaign that would raise awareness amongst Manchester students of the dangers of binge drinking.
One inventive group developed a campaign called ‘Don’t Cross the Line’ focussing on the effects of binge drinking and the link between alcohol abuse and sexual violence in the student community. The students conducted their own flash mob outside the MMU Business School, demonstrating their new found PR skills in dancing and performance!! Don’t Cross the Line Flash Mob
In addition, the group produced, filmed and edited a short film for distribution on social media highlighting the key messages of their campaign. Don’t Cross the Line Short Film
A second group focused on how binge drinking prematurely ages young people, and presented their campaign ideas incognito as ‘aged’ old ladies.
BINGING BIDDIES: PR students Kirsty Wooton, Sarah Chamberlain, Georgina Hearn and Catherine Thompson present their campaign ideas.
At last, according to this article by Anne Gregory, The Days of the Glorious Amateur are Over, our industry employers are starting to see the value of PR graduates.
I have, for several years, been extremely frustrated to read features in PR Week that harp on about how PR Graduates are unnecessary to industry, while at the same time I receive countless requests for good PR graduates from employers, and read studies from academics such as Alison Theaker that track the meteoric career rise of PR graduates in the US compared with their non-cognate colleagues.
Europe, and specifically Britain, at last appear to have cottoned on to the incredible fact that studying a subject for several years of your life might actually make you better prepared to fulfil the requirements of your work than not doing so – amazing!!
Progress at last… and very good news for our graduates at MMU.
At a time when Mental Health is such a sensitive issue and increasing in terms of both public awareness and anxiety, this example demonstrates the need for Public Relations to play a role in all elements of a business.
The Public Relations department should have had sight of the new range proposed for this season to ensure any such incidents were headed off at the earliest possible moment. This is a good example of a large organisation NOT using the systems theory ‘boundary spanning’ function of Public Relations to its fullest extent.
As usual, the Public Relations department is instead left dealing with a crisis it could easily have averted if it had been involved at the appropriate stages of new line development.
MMU PR Blog 