Every year, the Public Relations Student Society of America (PRSSA) hosts the Bateman Competition, a national case study competition in which public relations students across the country create a campaign for a client of PRSSA's choosing, and at the end PRSSA selects several winners. This year, PRSSA selected the Lymphoma Research Foundation (LRF) as their client, and participants were tasked with creating a campaign that would achieve the following objectives: 

• Position the Lymphoma Research Foundation as a leader in serving the needs of all those impacted by a lymphoma diagnosis.

• Develop materials and resources that resonate with the AYA community to raise awareness of lymphoma, and educate about the disease and unique needs among this population.

• Foster relationships and partnerships with key organizations and influencers for campaign collaboration.

One of my classes for spring of 2022 was centered around participating in this competition with a group of classmates. To begin, we came up with our campaign name and branding, which was very youthful, fun, and involved the colors that LRF already incorporates into their own branding. We named our campaign "Wipeout Lymphoma" in an effort to reflect one of LRF's popular campaigns, Erase Lymphoma, and also to reach the target audience of adolescents and young adults (AYA's) who will likely be familiar with the hit television show, Wipeout. To tie this element into our campaign, we included small wipes on all of our promotional items. The areas of the campaign that I was in charge of include:

• Reaching out to and working with influencer and Survivor winner Ethan Zohn. Ethan is a lymphoma survivor and had worked with LRF in the past, and I had the idea to reach out to him to send us a video to promote our campaign. He ended up responding to me and sending a video. This was an incredible opportunity to gain experience in influencer marketing, learn how to communicate properly with influencers, and to get to work with someone I am a huge fan of and have watched on Survivor many times!

• Forming our partnership with our campus Dance Marathon program. To achieve the objective of fostering relationships with key organizations, we partnered with Dance Marathon, a program that raises money for local hospitalized children, to have a social media campaign together and to host an event to raise awareness for both of our causes. 

• Creating the campaign packet

My experience with the Bateman Competition was incredibly valuable, as it gave me real-world experience in developing a campaign from start to finish and had given me so much experience in various aspects of public relations, such as influencer marketing, social media, event coordination, graphic design, and more! 

To read about the rest of our campaign, please scroll through this campaign packet, which highlights everything we achieved: