In my senior year of college at Utah Valley University, I competed in the 2013 Bateman competition. This competition is hosted by the Public Relations Student Society of America and gives PR students the chance to plan, implement, and evaluate a campaign.

With a few exceptions, each campaign topic focuses on a social issue. The 2012 teams created campaigns that focused on kids eating healthy food. In 2013, my team and I was asked to create an anti-bullying campaign.

As for the timeline, we started planning our campaign in October. To start, we conducted extensive research, which helped us understand the impact that bullying has on the bully, the victim, and the larger community.

Based on these findings, we created a hyper-local campaign to help kids at a middle school in Provo. As per the rules of the contest, we then had the entire month of February to implement and measure the success of our plan.

In addition to helping our community, our campaign received the following awards:

  • Honorable Mention from PRSSA for the competition
  • Golden Spike – Best of Show

If you would like to download the whole guide as a PDF, click here.