“Pride: Moments of pride are the stories that you cherish. Often these moments start in high school...when your football team won the homecoming game, when your dance team advanced to state, or when you made it on the podium at International DECA. These are the moments in life when you think back and you're proud of your high school experience.” This will be our opening statement when we present our Public Relations project at DECA State next weekend. We are proud of this project, but we are more proud of how the MWHS students and the community have reacted and responded to this campaign. We can’t believe that we made it to day 100!! It’s been a bumpy road at times, but we knew that we had a community that would step up, and help us make this project thrive!
We are proud of the fact that this Public Relations campaign has inspired other sports and activities to increase pride at their own events. Both the boys’ and the girls’ basketball teams created a “golden ticket” program that granted an MWHS student free admission into any home game. The large student section at home games promoted pride and encouraged teams to play their best. This campaign not only altered the attitudes of students and the community, it also inspired many other sports and activities to start their own Twitter accounts. At Mound Westonka it became the norm to have a Twitter account for any extracurricular activity. It was amazing to see individual sport/activity Twitter pages including the #MWHSPride hashtag.
Overall, we feel that the campaign has been a success and has received a large amount of positive feedback from students, staff members, and community members. For example, we received an email from a guidance counselor after a student wrote an appreciation post dedicated to her. She said that, “it had brought her to tears and reminded her why she had chosen to work at Mound Westonka.” Signs of appreciation like this have motivated us to keep working hard throughout the campaign.
In the beginning of the campaign we were nervous about whether the #MWHSPride hashtag would catch on within the student body. We found that the number of tweets during football games completely exceeded our expectations. People would expect that during a pride campaign, a lot of tweets about pride would be tweeted during football games, but considering out team’s losing record the tweets were unexpected. Mound Westonka students still found things to celebrate, even if were down by 50. This truly indicated how positively the campaign affected our student body.
This blog – “170 Days of MWHS Pride” also got the community involved. Many parents have made reading the blog a part of their day, and requested to write a blog post without any prompting from our team. Every week it has been a challenge to find a new blogger for all 170 days, so this positive response made the challenge of finding bloggers a little easier.
When Alex and I began the MWHS Pride PR Campaign, we knew it would entail a lot of hard work throughout the entire year. In order to connect with students, we had to reach out to them in a way they were familiar with – social media. This was a tough project to get started, but once it was started, it became one of the most rewarding experiences for everyone involved. The key to this project was not only to promote MWHS Pride, but to live and feel MWHS Pride!
Courtney and Alex
If you have a story that you would like to share, please email mwhspride@277apps.org for more information! We would love to hear from you!
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