Inviting Barack Obama to the University of Illinois Commencement
A co-worker of mine approached me regarding an independent student-led project that we would take up over the course of our two semester this past year. The goal was a lofty one: to successfully invite former president Barack Obama to speak at the May 2017 Commencement through a public relations campaign. On this page, I have outlined the different aspects of the marketing and public relations campaign.
Step 1: Gathering Student Leaders
Our first task was to reach out to other student leaders at the University. This included students who has connection to administration, large student organizations and Greek life, or students that we generally well-connected. After meeting with two different small groups with a total of about 20 students, my co-worker and I created a Facebook page to stay in constant communication with them. Moving forward, this group of student acted as our ambassadors. Each time we were to share something on social media or hold an event, we worked with them to spread the word as far as it could go.
Something we utilized at our letter writing event was a cardboard cut-out of Mr. Obama that students could take pictures with to post on social media.
Step 2: Letter Writing
Before we moved into the public announcement of the campaign, we asked each of the student leaders to write a letter to former President Obama as a personal invitation. We sent each of these letter separately in hopes that some of them would actually be read by Mr. Obama.
After announcing the campaign to the public, the next checkpoint in our campaign was to organize a letter writing event where students could come and write a letter to the former president explaining why they wanted him to come speak at Commencement. My co-worker and I reserved space in the Illini Union, garnered special letterhead, and provided food for the event itself. Local news stations came by and we had over 75 students write letters to Mr. Obama, which were sent by bulk to him in the following weeks.
Above is the logo that we used on our letterhead and in our social media presence.
Step 3: Social Media Outreach
During this entire process, we set up a Facebook event as well as a Twitter account to continue to push our materials on the social media side of things. Our Facebook event ended up with over 3,000 people being "invited" or "interested." We used both these accounts to reach out to alumni or those well-connected to Mr. Obama, such as Michael Strautmanis (the Vice President of Civic Engagement for the Obama Foundation) and Nick Offerman (actor from "Parks and Recreation").
A large part of the promotion on both Facebook and Twitter was asking people to sign our online petition on Change.org. To date, this petition has received over 3,100 supporters. The petition received hundreds of inspirational comments and served as a platform for those who were unable to attend our letter writing events, and people as far away as California and Brazil showed their support for the campaign. The petition can be seen with the link below.
The Final Piece: #ILLINOISInvitesObama Video
The final piece of our campaign was the production of the above video. As such, my co-worker and I brainstormed what the style of the video was to be, wrote the script, organized student leaders from the campaign to participate, and worked with the University's video team to oversee production. After spreading the video through social media, we gained nearly 100,000 views.