PR company situation

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COMM 2000 Foundations In Public Relations Individual Final Term Paper and Presentation (150 points)

Presentation: Dec. 3rd – Dec. 5th

Paper: Due Dec. 12th, Thursday (11:59pm) via Email

Objectives: By requiring you to work on real cases, we hope to meld theory with practice and expose you to a higher level of learning. This will give you insights about actual public relations management practices and how organizations negotiate through the muddy gray waters of crisis (conflict) management.

Here is how you can go about this individual final term paper and presentation.

1. Pick one company, non-profit group, government agency, sports team (player), or political candidate.

2. Identify a case, which you want to analyze. It can be a case that happened in Pittsburgh, nationally or internationally.

3. Justify why you think this case is worthy of studying. (Topic Due: Thursday, November 14th)

4. Collect information about the case. If you have access to the organization, you may want to conduct field visits and interviews with personnel involved in the case. This can be supplemented by management documents or other materials that aid your understanding of the case. For those who do not have such access to information, you will have to rely on news stories, press reports, press releases, or other research data.

5. Critically analyze how the organization dealt with the case. 6. Evaluate the PR management efforts. Questions to ask include how successful has the

case been managed? What did the organization not do? How can it improve on its performance?

Part I: Written Report (100 points): Your report should contain the following:

Introduce the organization (or sports team, sports player, political candidate).

Explain the case faced by the organization (or their use of campaigns). You must do some additional basic research from the library to add depth to the case. This information will help you “fill in the gaps” of the case provided.

Describe the level of the organization’s research, planning and PR strategies. - Explain how the organization communicated with its publics, inform us about its

choice of strategies, objectives, key messages, and tactics, and tell us about its media relations efforts.

Analyze how the situation was handled. - What was done well? If you think the organization did everything well, explain

why. - Consider what more could have been done.

Recommendations: What are the decisions alternatives?