Members of the North Dakota State University Public Relations Student Society of America (PRSSA) are spreading the word about how important it is to participate in the 2010 U.S. Census. They have created a public service announcement (PSA), featuring well-known people from the Fargo-Moorhead community who are encouraging people to "Be Counted."
"We wanted to give people a reason to care about the census," said Kelsey Miller, PRSSA president and a senior majoring in advertising from Champlin, Minn. "Sometimes people don't understand how much government funding we get and how much they are worth to North Dakota."
NDSU President Richard A. Hanson, Fargo Mayor Dennis Walaker, Miss North Dakota USA Taylor Kearns and Fargo City Commissioner Tim Mahoney are just a few people from the video who are spreading the message that filling out the U.S. Census questionnaire helps provide things like permanent flood protection. "The people of Fargo can definitely relate to the flood protection message," said Andrea Kopischke, project coordinator and a sophomore majoring in public relations from Morgan, Minn.
The public service announcement was created as part of the students' entry for the Bateman Competition, a national case study competition for the nation's PRSSA chapters to exercise analytical skills and mature judgment required for public relations problem-solving. All teams are assigned the same client. In last year's competition, NDSU received an honorable mention and was ranked in the top 15 universities out of 77 entries.
"We created this PSA to set us apart from the other competitors - to make our group shine a little bit," Kopischke said. The NDSU team worked on the video for about three to four weeks. Gavin Rehder of Fargo's Media Productions produced the video.
PRSSA teams learned in August their client would be the U.S. Census. They spent the next months developing their campaign and enacted it in February. After submitting a campaign report to the competition judges, the top three teams will be notified mid-April and will then travel to the national competition in Washington, D.C., in May.
The NDSU team recently helped the city of Fargo with the 2010 Census Portrait of America Road Tour visit, where they aired their public service announcement. The road tour is a national event where participants learn about the census and the impact their participation can have on their local community and the nation. Staff from the city of Fargo preferred the NDSU public service announcement to theirs, and has decided to show the video in some of their advertising spots.
During creation of the video, the NDSU team learned that each person who fills out their census questionnaire is worth $1,000 of funding per year to the state of North Dakota. "It's very interesting to see how the Census runs things because 10 years ago, we were only 10 to 13 years old," said Nadine Aljets, another project coordinator and senior majoring in mass communication and public relations from Carrington, N.D. "That is a lot of funding, and for people who don't fill it out, there is a lot of loss."
The creators have distributed the video to all the Fargo news stations and to the Bison Information Network. Go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrqkyjQyG_0&feature=player_embedded.