Hello, salutations, and welcome to the newly rebranded blog, Behind The Swing! This is your captain speaking, the seatbelt sign is now on, so strap in because you are in for the ride of a lifetime. My name is Tyler, and I am an account supervisor this semester for PR-120-A, more commonly known as The Swing Agency. For returning readers, welcome back! We’re changing the format of the blog, but we’re still the student-run agency you’ve come to know and love. For new readers, hello! I’ll get into who we are and what we’re going to do, in-class and for this blog, very soon. Like every class, the students change each semester, and so with a new staff, we thought it prudent to give a new direction to the blog. We hope you follow along with us and our bi-weekly uploads (read as every other week, not twice a week), as we detail what it's like working in The Swing Agency with real clients.
Who Are We?
Excellent question!
The Swing Agency is a class started in 2020 by Professor Semple that offers real-world agency experience while still maintaining the structure of a class. Think of it as an internship with a professor and a bunch of classmates ready to jump in to help you out. We have real clients too. This semester we are working with Ascend Long Island and PRSA’s Voices4Everyone, but we have previously worked with clients like Saint-Cyr Art Studio, The Long Island Advocate, and QDM Enterprise Inc., among others. Our official title is “a student-led integrated communication agency”.
What that means is although we have a professor who helps out and guides discussion, our agency has a student director, student account supervisors, and student account executives. This means that unlike an internship, the power structure is completely composed of our peers, so none of us get steamrolled or given unimportant busywork. We still have assignments to turn in, sure, but for all intents and purposes, we function as a fully-fledged, although small, PR agency.
( This is us!)
What are you going to do?
Another home run of a question! You’re pretty good at this. This semester we will be working with Ascend Long Island and Voices4Everyone. Ascend is an organization dedicated to assisting diversely owned businesses, and to help with that, they came to us to help increase their social media presence. Voices4Everyone on the other hand, is an offshoot of PRSA with multiple concurrent campaigns, one of which is fighting disinformation. Voices4Everyone set an objective to make the content they create much more easily accessible and widely distributed. To work towards these goals, we will run social media campaigns, create content, create and maintain web pages, providing media attention, and so much more, all the while promoting the Swing Agency itself.
You see, being formed only two short years ago, not nearly enough students know about the class, which is a shame because so far it has been a wonderful experience and here at The Swing Agency, we love to share the wealth. Part of that promotion is this very blog, where we will be posting in depth looks at different aspects of our campaigns and work, providing a peek into what happens behind the scenes of what I assume will be wildly successful endeavors. Every two weeks you’ll hear from another one of our six class members, each with their own responsibilities, expertise, and perspective. Trust me, you’re not going to want to miss this.
Wow, this sounds incredible! How can I get involved?
Aw shucks guys, thank you. For starters, if you’re interested in the class itself, talk to your academic advisor.The only prerequisite is PR-103, and I genuinely believe that The Swing Agency is an experience worth having, both on your resume and in your brain. Other than that however, we have a full suite of socials to follow that will be linked below, we have a podcast coming out where we interview industry professionals that’s well worth your time, and our clients have socials as well, where all the fruits of our labor will be posted.
We hope you’ll keep up with us over the semester, because we’ve got a lot of great things in the works right now, and we’d hate for you to miss out. Any readership and support is genuinely appreciated, and if you have any questions, comments, or declarations of love, you can direct them at our social media accounts, and we’ll talk about it in class! How exciting is that? As always, catch you guys on the upswing! (I’m trying to cement that as something like a motto, I don’t know if the rest of the class likes it, but I think I can swing it. Alright, see you in two weeks.)