Students in Felicia Harry’s Public Relations Campaign class have taken their senior project from the classroom to the streets of Thibodaux-in fact they’ve taken it to the biggest street Thibodaux has. Lenore Rink, mass communication graduate, was excited when she found out her campaign logo was on a billboard on Canal Boulevard.
“LT (Lauren Thompson, mass communication graduate) called me and was like ‘Did you see our billboard?'” Rink said. “I drove past just to see it.”
To say Danielle Stringer, mass communication graduate, was surprised would be an overstatement.
“I was just driving down Canal, and I had to do a double take,” she said. “As a class project I always knew it had the potential to be used-but it caught me off guard to see it in actuality.”
The billboard, which is in front of Dantin Chevrolet on Canal Boulevard, is part of a campaign against underage drinking conducted by the Bayou Council on Alcoholism.
Originally meant only to design a logo for the council, the group designed the Project 360 campaign as a part of their senior project.
In addition to the billboard, the BCOA is also running Project 360 ads in the local newspapers, including The Daily Comet and The Nicholls Worth, and they plan to launch their Web site soon.
Jackie Meyers, executive director for BCOA, said she was impressed by the students’ professionalism and expertise.
“It was wonderful,” she said. “Because we’re so busy, we usually take longer to do things, but they were so timely.”
The three main components behind Project 360 are to educate, prevent and enforce: educate the community about the severity of underage drinking, prevent adolescents from possessing and consuming alcohol and enforce current Louisiana drinking laws.
“It affects the whole community, not just the drinkers,” Rink said. “We want to involve everyone.”
Project 360 takes the place of the previous campaign run by BCOA, which was in black and white. The students designed the logo to be appealing to everyone-teenagers, parents and the entire community.
After it was completed, the group presented Project 360 to BCOA and representatives from Thibodaux Police Department, Lafourche Parish Sheriffs Office and the Thibodaux District Attorney’s office, who are collaborating with BCOA.
Meyers said the ultimate goal of Project 360 is to change attitudes about underage drinking.
“We want to eliminate the ‘rite of passage’ thinking,” Meyers said.
