Project Purpose
The purpose of my project was to help my chosen charity improve their SEO strategy, media presence, and influencer outreach. As a non-profit, the Know Your Lemons Foundation relies heavily on donations. In order to have donations they have to get their name out there and create awareness of what they do. My goal was provide the organization with the means increase donations and recognition with a PR plan focused on improving the website, creating press releases, and starting an online media kit.
Challanges
I came across many challenges during the execution of this PR plan. The first challenge I discovered was communication with my client. It was difficult to organize meetings and co-ordinate with a busy non-profit CEO in a different state. It was also difficult to find the balance between executing my clients wishes and what I felt was best for the company. There was a lot of compromise in order to establish a realistic plan of action. Originally, the client wanted a very influencer focused media plan, but after the trial and error of reaching out to influencers, she realized there were things that needed to be in place before influencer reach out was possible. I was able to help the non-profit form a realistic long term plan with these goals in mind.
Project Processes
- Meeting with client to establish goals and objectives
- Set event days and focus points for upcoming press releases
- Write press releases
- Created media list based on news and health journalists and influencers
- Evaluated website
- Created a sitemap to implement suggested changes from website evaluation
- Keyword research
- Content briefs
- Produced a SWOT to find opportunities for continuation of project
- Keyword research
- Blog optimizations with improvements addressed in website audit.
- Media kit website draft using Wix.
- Stewardship – Brief and optimization templates.
Experience
Overall, I have had a great experience being able to do hands on work for an organization I cared about. I feel like this project has helped me understand how to produce an overall strategy as well deliverables.
This project was not an easy process and required me to adapt my ideas to meet the needs of the client. I started with a clear plan which was edited along the way. I discovered the importance of research and trail and error in my project and although I was determined to have a sufficient amount of deliverables, research took priority. By researching solutions and ideas I was able to do a trial run and get feedback from audience members to improve my work. This was something my client responded very positively to.
I was not able to implement all of the work I produced so in terms of measurement and evaluation, a lot of my work will be determined by my ability to deliver what the client asked for. It will be up to the client to implement my work and track the success which makes it difficult to know if my strategies and tactics worked.
Takeaways
My biggest takeaway from this project has been the application of skills I have learned in the classroom. It is not very often I am able to do all aspects of the PR plan from start to finish. I have learned to listen to the clients needs rather than just their wants. I have also learned the importance of being able to explain what it is that I am doing and why. For the most part, my CEO was not aware of what was possible and did not have a good understanding of PR or marketing, so being able to help her see how my ideas could make a difference was essential. Knowing this about the CEO I worked with also meant that feedback and research helped solidify her decisions to move forward with my ideas and concepts.