The National School Public Relations Association (NSPRA) is heading to San Antonio for their 58th annual seminar.Themed “Creating Confidence in Our Schools,” the organization offers attendees a packed program from July 10-13.More than 500 educators from throughout the US are expected to attend.
Keynote speakers include Dr. Jackie Freiberg, recognized as one of the "Top 30 Best Minds on Leadership" by Leadership Excellence Magazine, and one of the most sought-after female business speakers in the nation. Her keynote topic for her July 11 session: "Gutsy PR! Timeless Choices for Building a Brand of Leadership & Accountability" is intriguing whether you are in education or not.
Another treat on the agenda is Dr. John Draper, currently CEO of the Educational Research Service, who has developed what he calls "Crucial Conversations About America's Schools. " His July 12 presentation will help educators step back from the rhetoric and pervading myth about "failing public schools" and look at the reality of what is happening in education.
More than 70 sessions cover a wide range of topics for school communicators including managing social media, creating your own newsrooms, new professional preparation , brand building for school districts, transparency and much more.
Nonmembers are welcome to register for the event here.
Local school public relations professionals have been working more than a year to help the national organization make the conference happen.Monica Faulkenbery, APR, Northside ISD; Patti Pawlik-Perales, Alamo Heights ISD; Sharon Woldhagen, Southwest ISD; Rebecca Villarreal, Schertz-Cibolo-Universal City ISD have planned some fun evening activities for our out-of-town guests to enjoy. Check out the website for the local activities.
This is yet another way to showcase our great city and all it has to offer.
Earlier this month, the long-awaited grand opening ceremony for Morgan’s Wonderland was carried live on Ustream It was the capstone of a year-long awareness campaign for the nations’ first theme park designed with accessibility and special needs in mind.
The park is the brainchild of San Antonio philanthropist and former builder Gordon Hartman and named for his special needs daughter Morgan. The park is a non-profit operation, so a large opening campaign so typical to theme parks was not an option, according to Bob McCullough, APR, Communications Director for Morgan’s Wonderland.
“One of the biggest challenges is communicating exactly what it is. It’s a theme park, but it’s not a theme park in certain respects,” says McCullough. “We don’t have tickets, we have reservations. There are no coupons, no promotions. Instead, because many families dealing with special needs are faced with economic challenges, we offer free admission to special-needs guests and $5 admission to those who come with them. Therefore, you have to approach things a lot differently.”
Approaching things differently was the hallmark of the park’s pre-opening campaign too. According to McCullough, the team at the Gordon Hartman Family foundation embraced social media very early, integrating a Facebook and Twitter presence with the park’s Web site. Reaching out to local social media groups like the Social Media Club of San Antonio and BMPR (Business, Media and Public Relations) was part of that plan.
Traditional media relations were important, too, says McCullough. First and foremost, educating and informing the local media was a key part of the plan. The park’s soft opening on March 3 featured great local coverage. “Then we started getting calls from Alaska and New York and everywhere in between because and the local stations kindly shared their stories with the networks” says McCullough. “We also received a tremendous boost March 8 when ‘ABC World News Tonight with Diane Sawyer’ aired a lengthy feature story.”
In the month after the soft opening of Morgan’s Wonderland, San Antonio’s ABC affiliate KSAT TV aired a 30-minute special on the park, which led to additional coverage by “Good Morning America” two days before the grand opening. The San Antonio Express-News produced a special insert about the park that was distributed April 4.
The grand opening on Saturday, April 10, featured former San Antonio Spur David Robinson and actress Eva Longoria Parker among the celebrities. McCullough estimates that more than 10,000 attended the opening. “Even though people had to wait a little to get in the park, there were millions of smiles. It was a great evening and the weather cooperated, too. Everything went beyond our expectations.”
But the public relations campaign is not yet over. McCullough is a veteran of the theme park business. While Public Relations Director at SeaWorld San Antonio, he and his team earned a Silver Anvil for the Grand Opening Campaign for that parks’ opening activities in 1988. So he knows the exciting challenges of telling the bigger story of Morgan’s Wonderland over the coming months.
“There are lots of different story angles,” says McCullough. “This is a special-needs story, a tourism story, a high-tech story, an architecture story, a design story. It lends itself to so many different story angles.”
As well, the $32.5 million dollar park is still in the process of raising funds to pay for the build-out. McCullough will also be involved in familiarization tours with community groups to spur them on to help contribute to the capital and operating costs.
Since grand opening, the park has received media inquiries from around the U.S. and overseas.
“This has been a truly heartwarming project,” says McCullough. “We’ll keep trying to spread the word and hope we will be discovered by Oprah and many others regionally, nationally and internationally.” In the meantime, the park has been discovered by families across the USA who have been waiting for a place like Morgan’s Wonderland.
Photo of the Hartman family at the opening of Morgan's Wonderland. Courtesy r.c. french photography, copyright 2010, All rights reserved.
What do you do when your entire marketing and PR plan suddenly gets axed? That’s what happened recently at the Alamo.
The Alamo’s marketing director, Craig Stinson spoke at our PRSA chapter luncheon in March. He outlined the amazing new initiatives the Alamo board and staff were taking to diversify revenue sources and build relationships with visitors and history buffs. Strategies included becoming accredited by the American Association of Museums, creating a service mark to begin collecting revenue from use of the new Alamo logo, starting a membership program so that fans could pay for special access to events and a newsletter, and stepping up the web site to include more social media features.
But as Scott Huddleston of the San Antonio Express-News detailed on Sunday, the whole thing seemed to go down the drain beginning in May when the Daughters of the Republic of Texas voted for a “delay.” Soon after, Craig resigned. I haven’t spoken to him. There could be other reasons for his departure. But the director, David Stewart, resigned in late May, the shop director retired and some members are taking steps to create their own group.
As a proud San Antonio resident, a fifth-generation Texan and relative of an Alamo survivor, I am really saddened by this news. I can’t help but wonder, will we ever get it back on track? Surely someone can broker the peace. Can the mayor help solve this rift on behalf of the city? Will the state have to step in? How about leaders in our local tourism industry?
After all, the Alamo is the most visited historical site in the state. Its success is our success.
Most everyone is troubled by the layoffs facing print journalists. It’s a tough time in newsrooms everywhere including San Antonio.
The news directors from the ABC, CBS, and NBC San Antonio television affiliates discussed the impact the economy is having on local coverage. The PRSA San Antonio luncheon was a record-breaker with 96 people attending to hear the news.
I was surprised just how easy it was to get the news directors to agree to meet. However, one news executive did tell me before the luncheon that discussing the news before the May ratings book makes good business sense.
News directors (seated left to right in photo) included:
In a nutshell, these highly competitive news execs said emerging technologies are forcing them to change. Social media, especially Twitter and Facebook are powerful influencers today, the news directors said.
TV stations have taken a big hit after their steady revenue source of car dealership ads dried up. However, the was no mention at all of possible job cuts.
As described in my last post, the San Antonio Express-News took on the city by investigating the status of city parks, their disrepair and unethical treatment of the city auditor. To date I have counted multiple articles by Todd Bensman (whose first story got the ball rolling, 6/9, 6/12 and 6/13) and Guillermo Garcia (6/22, 6/24) along with columns by Cary Clack (6/10), Jaime Castillo (6/10, 6/15), editor Bob Rivard (6/15), Ken Rodriguez (6/16, 6/20), Scott Stroud (6/28), public editor Bob Richter and the editorial board (6/19). Fourteen stories so far in one month. (Some of the articles are only available through the Express-News online archives.)
And with good reason. City leaders seemed to be much more concerned about looking good than about making sure that our children are taken care of. Though it is true, they were operating on information provided by the parks director, who turned out to be lying.
So, it took the city manager 28 days to speak up clearly. But there were some steps the city took leading up to that.
Three days after the first story hit, the city manager and the mayor announced that all 114 of the city’s playgrounds would be re-inspected.
Twelve days later, the parks and recreation department director was forced to resign. (Director of parks is forced to resign, 6/22)
Sixteen days later, a city council committee was set up to clarify the role of the auditor’s office and presumably how to keep it from being influenced by political interests. (Panel will examine post of city auditor, 6/24)
And finally, 28 days later, city manager Sheryl Sculley provided her own op ed with the opening line: “The safety of our children is a priority of the city of San Antonio.” She provided a summary of results from the inspections promised after the first story and gave a deadline for when repairs would be completed. She also pointed out that inspections did not categorize any playgrounds as dangerous. Finally, she stated that a long-term maintenance plan would be submitted to the council and that an analysis of the parks department service delivery was underway.
This case study is far from closed. There will be debates about the auditor’s office. There will be further checking into the status of playground repairs. I wouldn’t surprised if a lawyer somewhere is able to find a child who was injured on one of the dangerous playgrounds identified in the 2003 inspection. Wouldn’t you?
I’m curious about the role – if any – the city’s public relations staff played in this whole affair. I’d like to believe that they gave appropriate counsel and weren’t listened to. It’s also possible they weren’t involved at all. Perhaps some effective crisis communications training is in order for city leader staff.
Twenty-eight days. Four weeks. 672 hours. That’s how long it took for San Antonio’s city manager to stand up and say we are going to repair the city’s playgrounds. Twenty-eight days.
So here's the question. What do you do when a local newspaper or television station unveils your dirt? What do you do when they won't let go of an issue that you haven't solved?
Well the city of San Antonio’s current dangerous playground affair is a case study and exactly what not to do. And it’s still playing out (pardon the pun).
For those who don't know what's going on or don't live San Antonio, here’s the set up. The San Antonio Express-News has been publishing articles revealing the high number of city-owned playgrounds that have gone unrepaired for years, some of which have been rated dangerous. City leaders reacted – to put it mildly – defensively. Their lack of transparency and poor responses are weakening residents’ trust.
Trust buster #1: It all started in April when the city's auditor wanted to conduct an audit of the process the city uses to inspect it's playgrounds. The city committee refused to allow that audit to occur and fired the auditor.
So the city paper started digging and found that the last inspection in 2003 found “15 of 114 inspected playgrounds were so dangerous or substandard that they should be torn down, put off limits to children or extensively repaired.”
Trust buster #2: Many of those playgrounds have still not been repaired and there is no formal process for safety checks.
Trust buster #3: The playgrounds in the worst conditions are located in low-income, high minority sections of the city.
Trust buster #4: City leaders still maintain that an audit isn’t necessary, leading people to wonder what else they have to hide. According to the Express-News, the mayor claimed, “I don’t think Gonzales’ audit would have found a single thing!”
Since some people new beforehand that the Express-News was investigating and would be publishing a story, you would expect city leaders to be prepared to respond. But they weren’t.
Trust buster #5-10: When the first story by Todd Bensman broke on June 9, city leader responses included denials that there is a problem, claims that the auditor was fired for overstepping his bounds (which later articles refuted), sending crews out to wrap plastic yellow construction-zone tape around some playgrounds, a campaign by the city manager to show that playground safety has been well managed and that no serious lapses have endangered children, refusals to talk with reporters, distributing packets to city council members critical of the newspaper reporting, and pointing out that the city has not been sued for injuries to children on its playgrounds.
Everyone in public relations knows the first thing that you do is admit your mistake or misstep or whatever the wrongdoing is, apologize, commit to fixing it and commit to taking actions to keep it from happening again. City leaders did exactly the opposite; they tried to gloss over the multi-pronged problem.
After stumbling along, city leaders eventually began to take better actions to rebuild trust. In my next post, I’ll outline those steps.
If you are a PRSA San Antonio member with more than 15 years experience in public relations or a past chapter president, I hope you will plan to attend this breakfast on Thursday.
The topic is: The Fight Against Fake News
Description: In the context of FCC fines for use of video news releases on the one hand and fake news conferences on the other, how do public relations professionals build trust in our profession? How do these news stories affect our practice?
Date: November 8, 2007 ~ 7:30 a.m.
Location: Mama's Cafe #2 on Loop 410 and Nacogdoches, San Antonio
Even though this event is free, RSVP so we can reserve your space.
