Long Term Thinking

One of the first things I will be doing after the upcoming holidays is talk to a group of public relations officers about communicating with young people who either have or who are about to graduate from high school. As someone who has worked in public relations in a higher education setting for nearly 35 years, they want me to talk about how we go about communicating with that particular audience. It is an interesting question, particularly for those of us in higher education who face that challenge each semester. Students, after all, are what keep us afloat. But the question itself speaks to a more encompassing topic: strategic communication.

Connecting with any specific audience or public begins, for me, with a reaffirmation of the fundamental essence of what public relations is. Public relations professionals are relationship managers. It is these men and women who work to bring publics together and then keep them together over a sustained period of time. Consequently, any strategies devised to connect with high schoolers must be long-range in nature, not short-term. Remember: public relations is a long distance run, not a sprint. Yes, we want the prospective strudents to enroll at our institution but we also want them to stay with us, and then remain in our corner when they graduate.

Any plans for recruiting high schoolers to enroll are incomplete if they focus only on short-term strategies, such as sending representatives to high school fairs, doing on-line advertising, and/or sending out press releases. While these steps are valid, they do not or should not represent the entire package. This is an easy trap to fall into and often times many public relations professionals do just that. Communicating matters the most when it articulates a long-term commitment.