By Allison Zullo
This week’s meeting was the last for the semester. It’s crazy how fast time flies!
Announcements
- Our annual Thanksgiving Dinner is this Monday, Nov. 17 at Ben Clos’ apartment, 317 Palmer Place. Contact Megan Newton if you still want to bring a side dish or help cook. Also, bring a holiday outfit! We will be taking a “family picture” for a holiday card to send to our professional advisors and faculty members.
- PRSSA will be hosting a Twitter chat this Tuesday, Nov. 18 and 9 p.m. Come participate with Scripps PRSSA in Scripps 114 – there will be free pizza!
- The Mentor/Mentee game show will take place Thursday, Dec. 4 in Baker 231 at 8 p.m.
- Fred Cook, CEO of Golin, will be visiting campus and speaking Monday, Dec. 1 at 7 p.m. in Walter Rotunda. Make sure you mark your calendars to hear from one of the most well-known and influential people in the PR industry!
- Tentative dates for the spring semester networking trips are Friday, Jan. 30 for Cleveland and Thursday, March 26 – Friday, March 27 for Chicago. Get excited!
- Member spotlight this week is Steph Gort! She will be graduating this December and will be greatly missed by all of PRSSA. Give her a follow and a shout-out on Twitter at @StephGort.
- ImPRessions spotlight this week is AVW Productions (@AVWProductions). Congrats on a successful first event of the year, Punkin Chunkin’!
Project Updates
- International Education Week starts this Saturday, Nov. 15 with the International Student Dinner (which is sold old). It continues through Nov. 20. Visit their website, ohio.edu/iew, or follow the hashtag #OHIOIEW14 for more information and the full schedule of events.
- The Scripps Innovation Challenge team is working hard to promote weekly boot camps and recruiting teams to register for the challenge. Registration ends Dec. 4, so make sure to encourage your friends and peers to form a team to compete and register, even if they aren’t Scripps kids! Visit ohio.edu/scrippscollege/innovationchallenge and follow them on Twitter and Instagram at @SIC_OHIOU for more information.
- International Week will take place sometime in April and have designed a logo! The team is now in the process of solidifying an official marketing plan.
And now for today’s speakers: Lynsee Fowler and Gavin Gibbons from the National Fisheries Institute!
The National Fisheries Institute is a nonprofit organization based in Washington D.C. that focuses on educating the government and the public on seafood safety, sustainability, and nutrition. Fowler is the communications manager for the organization, while Gibbons is the vice president of communications.
This meeting was all about non-profit PR. Fowler and Gibbons explained that a large part of their job is advocacy for seafood safety. Even though they are not registered lobbyists, they are basically lobbying on Capital Hill constantly in order for their message to be heard by the government.
Gibbons stressed that if no one is talking about your message, it essentially doesn’t exist. Therefore, you must work to get people talking about it! The best way this can be done is to get it on paper, but social media or any other publication methods work well, too.
Fowler talked about an innovative PR/marketing strategy that has been successful for the NFI: short, edgy videos that get their message across in memorable way. They used tactics such as humor and fear (just a little bit…) to draw attention to the message they were trying to get across, and found that this method was successful in getting the attention of their target audience of government officials.
Thank you, Lynsee and Gavin, for speaking to #ScrippsPRSSA! We learned a ton about what it’s like to work for a non-profit organization in D.C.