Harlow College – Culture and Innovation PR Case Study

Harlow College is the UK’s oldest journalism institution and includes among its prestigious alumni Piers Morgan, Kelvin McKenzie, Martin Bell, Richard Madeley and Phil Hall.

Objectives

• To re-establish Harlow College as the no 1 journalism institution in the country.
• To help raise the student intake.
• To help set up journalism schemes with major newspapers.
• To help Harlow with internal PR.

Strategy and Implementation

• To target trade press as well as national and regional press.
• To determine strong student/staff stories and generate coverage.
• To generate new stories – one example was to appoint Phil Hall the ambassador of Harlow Journalism Centre, which we turned into a news story.
• To give students talks/lectures on journalism and PR.

Results

In the first three months we had secured coverage for Harlow across major national education titles including:

The Times, The Guardian Education (twice), The TES (Twice), Press Gazette, PR Week, Private Eye and The Sun (upcoming).

We have also established coverage several times across several regional publications including The Harlow Star, The Harlow Herald, The Harlow Citizen, The Birmingham Post and BBC WM.

Press Coverage