CGXperience

Based on the findings of the research, we extrapolated two things.

1.) We identified professors as the gatekeepers and primary influencers of potential qualified applicants.

2.) Professors were more likely to share and encourage opportunities they found were appealing and exciting with their students. The research also suggested that professors make the best recruiters, as they hand-select their best students for internship opportunities.

This finding conveyed to us that we could maintain a competitive edge in recruiting top talent for our internship if we targeted professors, rather 
than the students themselves. With this in mind, our primary audience became communications professors in Arkansas, and our secondary audience was identified as Arkansas college juniors and seniors majoring in applicable fields. The following SMART objectives were defined to support our primary goal of developing statewide interest in our internship by college juniors and seniors pursuing an applicable degree:

• Generate an average of 10 applications during 2022’s spring, summer, and fall semesters’ two-month application period.
• Drive enough traffic to our website’s internship page to make it rank in the top 10 visited pages during the open application period each semester.

We developed a strategy to support these objectives, which was heavily rooted in message matching, ensuring that we were communicating the right message about why students should apply for our internship, that would resonate with the right audiences, the right number of times, at the right times. From that, our strategy became:

1. Nurture an interpersonal relationship between the agency’s internship supervisor and targeted faculty at 
   Arkansas universities through consistent communication channels keeping upcoming application milestones and deadlines top of mind
2. Educate target faculty about the unique experiences and opportunities differentiating our internship program from competitor programs
3. Create a frictionless application process that is actionable and easily sharable
4. Support program awareness with supplemental social promotion targeting secondary audiences

This strategy informed the development of a program schedule that included key milestone dates to produce the necessary materials needed to execute an uninterrupted cadence of proactive communication with the primary and secondary audiences. This schedule takes approximately 6 weeks from start to finish, including a kickoff announcing the opening of the application process, multiple touchpoints with primary audiences, scheduled social media posts promoting the program and application deadlines, as well as first and second rounds of interviews, and offer dates. This schedule is repeated 3 times a year, once per semester.

Budgetary resources allocated for this project were based on the time needed to manage the coordination of this project between 1 internship supervisor and 1 social media specialist. The initial program setup was estimated to take a combined 10 hours. Each reboot of the program for the remaining 2 semesters was expected to take approximately 4 hours total. As an internal program, no service fees were applied, rather absorbed by the agency as overhead. No outside costs were associated with this program.

Implementation of the CGXPerience public relations campaign began with deciding what the key message of the announcement email should be. We used our research findings to develop our core message focusing on two things:

1. We have one intern per semester, so we’re able to spend more time mentoring our interns.
2. Each intern is responsible for a long-term project based on their interests that they create from scratch.

These messages were communicated to primary audiences in an email personally distributed to the professors we identified during our research stage. The email announces that we are looking for intern candidates and asks the professors to share our internship announcement with students they believe will be interested. An application deadline for the semester is also included, though the application remains open year-round.

Next, we decide when to send the email. College students start looking for internships quickly, and we want to make sure we reach the best candidates. Therefore, we start recruiting as early as possible each semester.

Lastly, we generate social media posts to support our overall public relations campaign. Working with our digital team, we use all of the agency’s social media accounts, including LinkedIn, to promote our internship and encourage potential applicants to apply. The social media content we craft includes posts about the internship at least once a week, so it remains top of mind for potential applicants. The digital team was also instrumental in setting up a digital application process that is user friendly, quick and easy to complete, sharable by linking, and automatically generates alert notifications whenever a new application is submitted, so our intern supervisor can be optimally responsive in acknowledging their submission – or answering any questions an applicant may have.