Utilizing public relations skills: Establishing a relationship with Fellowship Church

By Julia McGowen

The past week has been full of first impressions for the ladies of Red Stick PR. Last week, Kyleigh wrote about our newly created name and our plans for our first client meeting with Todd Blount, the campus pastor at Fellowship Church‘s South Ascension campus.

All six agency members met with Todd last Friday afternoon (Feb. 1) to discuss his hopes and needs for this service-learning opportunity and what we can offer to Fellowship Church. A fundamental objective of service-learning courses is to foster an understanding of social issues in teh community; we were very happy to find out Todd shares this belief. We spent a good deal of our meeting learning about the history and culture of the church and its members and leaders. We then discussed the organizational structure of the church, its mission and what we could do to help meet its needs.

Todd told us the main goals at this time are to build relationships with people in the community surrounding the brand new South Ascension campus and to establish a positive reputation in that community. We also discussed prior efforts the church had made to connect with its surrounding community, new opportunities to reach out to that community and what Fellowship Church hopes to offer its new neighbors. Todd’s primary interest is finding the real pulse of the new community; with thus information the church can find a way to serve, foster and be a blessing to the community. After gathering the necessary background information from Todd we worked together to negotiate deliverables Red Stick PR will create.

In order to increase the visibility and awareness of Fellowship Church in the local area Red Stick PR will:

1. Perform primary research and utilize secondary research to assess the perceived needs of the people in the South Ascension area. Fellowship Church can then use this information to meet the needs of its community.
2. Create a social media plan to help increase the online visibility of Fellowship Church through established social media channels (Facebook and Twitter).
3. Create a crisis communication plan.
4. Promote and assist Fellowship Church with an event (details TBD).
5. Help Fellowship Church build a positive reputation in the community and establish new relationships with members of the community.

Since last week our agency also composed our mission statement and created a complete style guide including logos, colors, fonts, a letterhead and business cards. We also presented these items to our class and officially introduced ourselves as Red Stick PR.

When crafting these items and this image, our hope was to create a cohesive and polished brand image for our agency that reflect the principles that bring the members of Red Stick PR together. Our “about us” paragraph and mission statement were the real creative driving force behind our final logo design, which then inspired the overall design of the style guide.  We used these words to translate what our agency stands for into an image, and we hope the people of Baton Rouge can appreciate that.

The origin of our agency name, Red Stick PR, derives from common themes among the members of our agency. Our goal in creating our agency name was to make it true to the people we are by capitalizing on our uniqueness as a group. Six girls with six very different backgrounds were led to Baton Rouge to study public relations; this is what connects us. In order to stay true to our Louisiana State University roots we wanted to integrate some Louisiana flavor. The French words “Baton Rouge” translate to “red stick,” so we thought it would be appropriate to use in our agency name. We also wanted to find a fresh and fun way to express our femininity; hence the incorporation of lipstick in our logo as a play on the word “stick” in “red stick.” We are passionate about the brand we are developing and hope that members of the Baton Rouge area appreciate the inspiration behind it.

Our mission at Red Stick PR is to forge meaningful, long- lasting relationships between our clients and their unique audiences by strategically communicating the client’s brand through truthful, transparent & individually tailored messages.

                                                         (Official logo of Red Stick PR).

As design director I executed the layout and overall design of the style guide and did my best to bring all of our brainstorming to life. I used Adobe Illustrator to design and color both the full-color logo and black and white logo. I then used Adobe InDesign to layout the full style guide, letterhead and business cards.

Within the next week we plan to begin our primary research for Fellowship Church. Sydney, our research director, has started working on a survey we will be carrying out at River Parishes Community College near Fellowship’s new South Ascension campus, as well as plans for further primary and secondary research that will help us in our campaign planning stages.

For more information on Fellowship Church or to keep up with its progress via other sources, check out the website, Facebook and Twitter (@FC_Prairieville). Meanwhile, stay tuned for more updates from the ladies of Red Stick PR. For more information about me visit my LinkedIn profile or follow me on Twitter (@juliamcgowen).

Thanks for reading!