Miramar, FL- On April 6, 2020, seven UIC students started taking PUR 301: Introduction to Public Relations taught by Dr. Marcela Moyano. The course began only two weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic quarantine and was delivered online through UIC’s Online Campus.
The first weeks of the course students learned the fundamental concepts of Public Relations, which prepared them to develop a Public Relations Campaign Proposal for their startups or a client’s company.
Students carefully identified a Campaign Overarching Objective, the publics that were going to be targeted in this campaign and specific goals, strategies, tactics and key messages. They developed a campaign budget and calendar, and finalized their campaigns with an evaluation instrument to assess the success of their campaign.
On May 4th, Jessica Levy, founder and president of Levy, a public relations, events, and social media agency, virtually visited the class and shared with UIC students her experience as an expert in the field. She shared with them examples of initiatives executed with her clients that demonstrated the value of public relations. As a result of this talk with Jessica, students were able to understand the nature of the field and picture themselves as PR practitioners.
On May 25, students submitted the first part of the P.R. Campaign Proposal. They continued editing their work and adding to their proposal on a weekly basis. On June 15, they were ready to deliver their final presentations. Daniela Del Valle, prepared a campaign for her audio visual company, DVSA Corp, and invited her partner, Santiago Del Valle to listen to her final presentation and give her feedback.
Martha Rodriguez prepared a campaign for ATR Group, a real estate agency. After much thought and feedback from the professor and classmates, she successfully completed her campaign. On the day of her presentation, she shared with the class that ATR Group was already implementing some of the proposed tactics in her campaign.
“I am a graphic designer and now I study Communications & Media at United International College. This term I took the Public Relations class with Professor Marcela Moyano. I am so impressed because I had never imagined how much I could learn. For the final project we had to make a public relations campaign proposal for a company, I chose to do it for a team of real estate agents. It was incredible and hard work because I had to do a careful investigation of the team on its public, competitors, mission, vision, and then design the proposal with a main objective and three goals with excellent strategies, tactics and messages to reach them. I really enjoyed doing it. I was able to learn more than I ever imagined.”
Renata Diniz, developed a P.R. Campaign Proposal on her company Tasty Bites. As most of the students, she also did a wonderful job crafting her tactics and coming up with creative ideas to engage new customers.
All the course was delivered through UIC’s online classroom, The Big Blue Button, which facilitated and enhanced student interaction through break out rooms. Students truly embraced technology and excelled at it! This can be appreciated through their public relations campaign proposals.
Learn more about UIC Communications and Mass Media Programs