And Carrie On

As a public relations and communications professional, my last few months have been consumed with planning to host an eclipse event on campus.

As a higher education institution with an access mission, hosting an event to invite the larger community was a key part of our strategy to raise the perception of the campus and our faculty, both regionally and in our local community.

The Strategy

The UA Little Rock Eclipse public relations strategy hinged on three key tenets. We wanted to use this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to position our experts as leaders in their fields. We wanted to highlight the event and the aspects of the event that were unique. Finally, we used gamification as a means to spread the word about the eclipse within the community.

Of course, like anything, this event did not mean the regular work stopped. Instead, we had a 20 plus member committee who focused on this work in addition to all the other work that happens each spring.

Experts

We engaged 7 experts who had specialty expertise that related to the eclipse. We put this information on our eclipse website and had a dedicated member of our team help coordinate reach outs. We also created videos with each of the experts, which we used on social media. However, this also helped the media to get a sense of each expert.

In addition to coaching the experts about their particular expertise, we also engaged the experts on mentioning the campus event that would be happening.

Our experts were picked up coast to coast and represented the university so well on topics such as economic impact, pet behavior, and Native American history.

Events

The university event was another place we knew we could have an impact. We put together a media kit complete with moon pies, event details and other facts about the eclipse. We delivered this to our media partners in the state to make sure they knew about the work we were doing.

Additionally, we got the full details of the event on our website really early, so we led on SEO related to the Eclipse. In fact, when you search eclipse, Arkansas, and Little Rock, we were the top search result. This was coupled with a strong advertising push including digital ads, print ads, and a billboard driving people to the event.

A final aspect of the event was highlighting unique aspects of the event. We had 30 thousand pairs of free glasses, a portable planetarium, and a device that would translate the eclipse to sound waves.

Our event coverage landed us with statewide coverage, a mention in InsideHigherEd, and a station from a key growth market coming to campus and broadcasting live.

Interaction

Our final strategy was to make the eclipse fun. We had a member of our team come up with a great idea to develop a trivia game. It was Wordle meets Eclipse trivia. It drives awareness about the event but also helps to make the eclipse fun, even if science isn’t your thing.

Our team helped with questions, tested the game, and saw lots of engagement around it.

Success Highlights

The eclipse work really took a ton of time, but I can also share it had a large impact on campus and on our community.

Lessons Learned

As I’ve reflected on the eclipse from a PR perspective, I’ve come up with a few takeaways that I think could apply to any large event.

Don’t Underestimate Your Experts – As a higher education leader, I have been fascinated by how much our experts have helped us gain reach. Their work in talking about eclipse-focused topics has been helpful to our media partners locally, regionally, and nationally. Our experts made national coverage in multiple ways including:

• Washington Post
• NPR
• ABC National News
• Yahoo

I am grateful that our experts allowed us to share their stories, and the value they added to the eclipse conversation is something that will stay with me.

The Website Has Real Power – We built a holding site early and then updated it as we had new information about the event. Because we got out early with a holding site, we were able win in SEO. Ranking in Little Rock was important for people coming to the city and making sure they knew about our event.

As ads were launched and we had traction in the media about our event, we saw corresponding spikes in site traffic. People were curious and willing to visit the website because we made the link easy to remember and regularly had new information added.

Consider the Value – When I was first approached about helping lead this event, I wasn’t that excited. I thought it would be a huge time suck with no real value. I was partly right. And definitely partly wrong.

It was a huge time commitment. However, I was way off about the value. This has helped raise awareness about the university and has led to lots of positive coverage about academics. In a world where we are competing for students, that positive coverage will play a key role as future students consider UA Little Rock and as counselors and parents make decisions about where to suggest students look.

Additionally, this has become a great way to make science fun and invite the community. That community can include future students, parents, alumni, friends and donors. Giving the community a rallying point without an ask for anything, can hopefully open the doors to allow those groups to build a relationship with the university.

Closing Thoughts

When you have those big one-time events, think broadly about how they could support your university and mission. That will play a key role in how you think about your response and what’s best. At the end of the day, we tried to live our brand pillars, and doing that helped guide both the event itself and also how we tried to tell our story about the phenomena.