Educational Technology PR Campaign

The Problem

With student disengagement and the number of high school drop outs reaching staggering numbers, Abilene Christian University’s faculty and technology staff committed to building distinctive and innovative programs so tomorrow’s graduates prosper in our 21st century, interconnected world. The university launched a mobile learning initiative, the first of its kind and unlike any other school in the world. The school is located in west Texas, 200 miles from a major metropolitan area. The school’s middle name, Christian, does not help matters. Securing national media coverage proved challenging.

The Solution

The visual story was the distribution of devices to incoming freshman students on Saturday August 15, 2008.  We knew that no national media would travel to Abilene to cover the event due to the Olympics, high gas prices and small weekend news staffs.  We recommended that ACU invest in the rental of uplink truck and airtime on a satellite in order to feed raw footage to the networks. E.H. Anderson PR pitched the ACU feed to all major media.

The Results

Coverage occurred on ABC’s World News Tonight on August 23, 2008 and in 50+ local markets including KNBC-TV CH 4 (NBC) Los Angeles and KXAS-TV CH 5 (NBC) Dallas/Fort Worth.

For print, coverage was secured in The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, BusinessWeek, Inside Higher Ed, Chronicle of Higher Ed, Wired’s Gadget Lab, THE Journal, Campus Technology and eCampus News.

Since the August 2008 distribution, we have secured coverage of ACU’s mobile learning initiative in hundreds of print, web and broadcast media outlets including NBC Nightly News the day the iPad was announced and USA Today for ACU’s K-12 masters in educational technology online programs.

In 2010, ACU received one of its highest number of applications, and the student ACT scores averaged higher than in years past. Our educational technology PR campaign expanded.   In 2011 we led the marketing for ACU’s Connected Summit 2011. Ars Technica’s Chris Foresman attended and covered the conference after offering him the exclusive.  We provide content for the posts @acuconnected on Twitter and Facebook’s ACU Connected page.