COMSTRAT 562: Creative Media Strategies & Techniques
Spring 2017 – Washington State University – Professor Cara Salazar
Creative Media Strategies and Techniques is an advanced writing course designed to develop expertise in writing for a variety of media including advertising, PR, digital media, print and more. We gained this expertise by completing weekly readings and discussions, practice activities, and micro projects which culminated in an all-inclusive final awareness campaign.
The text for the course – the New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott – provided valuable insights on how to use social media, press, blogs, video, and viral marketing techniques reach target audiences. The semester project for COMSTRAT 562 tasked us with creating an awareness campaign that employed digital strategies and techniques to spark audience engagement and participation supporting a not-for-profit/cause-based initiative.
Awareness Campaign
The cause-based initiative I chose to support was Hostelling International USA’s (HI USA) Community Hostel Fund (CHF), which supports and facilitates their Explore the World Scholarship program. The Explore the World Scholarship is available to 18-30 year olds, and is intended to offset costs associated with international travel with an educational or volunteer activity component. Each scholarship recipient receives $2,000, which can be applied to any trip related expense.
I chose this organization because I have been the Seattle CHF committee chair for the past two years, and I wanted to create a campaign that we could use locally. Over the course of two-years, the Seattle CHF has been able to provide 6 scholarships while increasing our presence from 3 to 5 counties. This campaign will help our volunteers promote and award the scholarships, fundraise, and conduct outreach.
The awareness campaign was comprised of the following components:
- Research
- Message and brand
- Goals
- Inverted pyramid
- Landing page
- Social media
- Opinion piece
- Online advertising
- HTML email
You can read the entire awareness campaign here.
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Bill Michie 