Do what you love

Advertising 489, Advertising and Public Relations Campaigns, must be an incredibly fun course, taught by Stacy James at the University of Nebraska College of Journalism. It's a hands on senior-level course, where students create a marketing campaign during the semester for an actual client.

We were incredibly fortunate to be the client of this Spring's class. These students spent the semester creating police officer recruitment campaigns for us. In January, myself and several other staff members had a great meeting with the class at police headquarters. We had a far reaching conversation about who were trying to attract, what we have to offer, and what sets us apart. Although we have huge numbers of applicants, we were interested in recruiting more successful applicants--high quality men and women with solid educations looking for socially-significant work, and prepared for the complexity and challenge of policing.

The students took the seeds from their initial meeting with the client, formed into two teams, conducted their own market research (including focus groups of recently-employed LPD officers), and created two competing campaigns. Yesterday, they presented these campaigns to about a dozen LPD staff members and to members of the faculty at the J-College. They even had donuts for the clients.

It was unbelievable. The quality of the work, the enthusiasm of the students, their professionalism and delivery were just top notch. The results were advertising themes, printed materials, radio and TV spots, web sites, posters, brochures, cards, CDs, public relations events, and more. These are all concepts that we can implement, and the presentation included materials and price quotes we can run with when we find the cash.

The two teams, BallyHoo and Under the Radar, had quite different approaches, but also some similarities. They both honed in on the importance of using great electronic communication--especially dynamic web content--for this target audience. They have obviously crawled all over my blog, which explains the uptick in hits from the UNL domain.

I'm sticking up some of the printed display materials they prepared around the department for everyone to see, and we'll be trying our best to incorporate some of this great work in our future recruitment. Very well done, teams, it's clear you love what you do!

Recruit blog

The idea was hatched by a group of University of Nebraska advertising students, in the spring of 2008. One of the two teams who took us on as their customer suggested, as part of their marketing plan, a blog about police academy training. It was one of many ideas developed by the class, several of which are now reflected in our recruitment materials and our web site.

This one took a few months to take flight, as our newest class of 18 officers was assembled. It is a blog about the police academy by the class members. I think it will be a great way for young people to learn a little bit about our profession. It is also going to be an engaging read for anyone thinking about applying at LPD, or applicants already in the process. Even members of the public at large will be interested in the weekly account of the police academy training.

Team BallyHoo gets the credit for the concept, Officer Katie Flood for the technical/artistic work on the web page, and Police Trainee Jeff Schwartz for being the first recruit out of the chute with his account of week two. Other bloggers from the current class will continue giving us a glimpse into the academy over the next 17 weeks leading up to graduation day.