Student-run PR and Ad Groups deliver for Red Sox Foundation

Each fall, PRLab hosts an 18-hour event called PRoBono, where members of Boston University’s student-run agencies PRLab and AdLab provide a handful of Boston-based nonprofits with free PR/advertising campaigns. In 2015, students focused primarily on providing the Red Sox Foundation with a comprehensive social media campaign to help boost funds for an event known as Giving Tuesday. The groups achieved their goal, and also took first place in the “Best Community-Nonprofit Partnership” category of Ragan’s 2016 Nonprofit PR Award.

The team created Twitter and Instagram content, sharing graphics that helped people understand the kind of impact they could make with their donations. In 2014, the Foundation’s Giving Tuesday campaign earned $1,400; the student groups set a goal to exceed that and far exceeded their expectations, inspiring donations of more than $8,000. 

PRLab elected to shine the spotlight on one of the Foundation’s programs, Red Sox Scholars, by sharing short videos of scholars from previous years. The campaign also made the contributions tangible by sharing examples of what a donation could mean (e.g., a $100 donation could send one of the program’s scholars to camp). 

A 10-day countdown to Giving Tuesday whetted appetites and maintained awareness, resulting in thousands of impressions and hundreds of favorites and retweets, an impressive outcome for so localized a campaign; the Foundation attributed more than half of the 2015 donations to the students’ social media efforts. 

Congratulations to PRLabs’ Haley King and Megan Doherty.