by Kaitlin Van Loon
UNL’S Public Relations Student Society of America (PRSSA) Club kicked off its new campaign #SpreadHopeNotFear with the hope of helping people get through this time of such extreme change.
Junior advertising and public relations major and PRSSA president Lauren Tritch remembers calling an emergency exec meeting when UNL announced classes would be online for the rest of the semester.
“Our game plan from the start was how are we going to restructure our meeting and how are we going to help other people. This was spearheaded by our club advisor Jemlayn Griffin, she’s always looking for ways to be creative with whatever challenge we’re given,” Tritch said. “It’s great to have a leader like that because I don’t know if helping others was our immediate thought so she definitely helped stimulate that conversation.”
After that, the team was all on board to create a campaign that would hopefully give people something they need— and right now, that’s hope. The idea stemmed from the PRSSA team’s analysis of the situation and the effect it was having on their mental, physical and emotional health.
“The Spread Hope, Not Fear Campaign is an opportunity for our students to spread positivity amid a global pandemic. I’m so proud of our students’ ability to overcome adversity and mobilize their response through this campaign. They are learning the foundation of public relations,” Griffin said.
There are two options to interact with #SpreadHopeNoteFear. One of them is to fill out the form linked in the club's social media bios. The form is for people who might not feel comfortable sharing directly on their account, or for those who don't have any social media accounts. The other option is for people to post on their social accounts and use the #SpreadHopeNotFear hashtag while tagging PRSSA on Instagram or Twitter.
Junior advertising and public relations major Jamie Brunken is the VP of digital communications for the PRSSA club, she is another key communicator on the campaign because she runs the club’s social media accounts.
“We wanted to offer our members something to look forward to during this pandemic and we thought this would be a great way to get them involved and give them a sense of normalcy,” Brunken said.
Brunken wants her classmates to remember that just because they’re stuck at home, doesn’t mean they need to spend all of their time on school, and Tritch agrees.
“This is the time to focus on the small victories of learning something new each day like forcing yourself to try a new exercise or cooking something you've never made before,” Tritch said. “Because these are the types of experiences happening to everyone right now and we want to create an atmosphere that focuses on the hopeful events despite all the negative ones.”
PRSSA is also working on a project with CoJMC’s Student Advisory Board (SAB) to virtually gather CoJMC students for an hour over Zoom to catch up with one another. Senior advertising and public relations and communications double major and SAB president Lizzie Boeschen brought the idea to Tritch who later incorporated it into the #SpreadHopeNotFear campaign.
“We decided to call them Happy Hours. We got the idea from Happy Hour News, a podcast that a couple of students did a few years ago. Their podcast was about sharing positive news in a world that can seem so negative,” Boeschen said.
Each day students have three opportunities to meet up over Zoom— a coffee hour, a lunch hour and a happy hour—and connect with their CoJMC family.
SAB and PRSSA hope that this project will evolve as it goes on and provide a platform for people to find their way back to each other. They plan to bring on faculty members to lead discussion topics and have other sessions with fun themes.
“Fear of the unknown is a big anxiety for many right now. It’s a lot of fear and frustration, and I feel like this a lot of the time too, everyone does. This campaign is a way to give people a break from those anxieties and focus on the good,” Tritch said.
There’s still a lot of positive and hopeful things happening in the world, and it’s PRSSA’s mission to find those good things. If you want to help here are the links to their social media accounts and the form mentioned above:
Instagram: @unlprssa
Twitter: @unlprssa
Form: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd-ZNdqSC-a_bk-wsweCeuwjiYxNfEeak0sHhlw94IaNT-ioA/viewform?pli=1
April 9, 2020
