Every April, the Public Relations Student Society of America (PRSSA) on campus creates a campaign for National Organ Day Awareness Competition (NODAC) in order to encourage students to sign up to be organ donors. 

The campaign has a different theme every year, this year’s theme being “Launch Life,” a rocket-themed project. 

Jocelyn Nunez, the vice president of events on their executive board, explained the rationale behind the theme.
“For our theme this year we wanted to focus on the idea of creating a new life for someone when you are an organ donor,” she said. “We came up with ‘Launch Life’ to showcase that idea – ‘launch’ inspired us to use NASA/space/rocket-like colors and graphics.”

Nunez was one of the members of the executive board who helped plan the campaign, along with others in the organization. 

“We had about eight other members who helped us out along the way, which was nice because we are still trying to improve our numbers since COVID happened,” Nunez said. “Also, the public relations techniques [course] helped us plan our social posts and create graphics.”

There were a lot of different steps to this process, which included planning from the whole team working on the campaign. 

Nunez herself liked the planning stage for the experience she got from it.

“Planning this campaign was a super fun experience,” Nunez said. 

“We started with coming up with a theme, research and our event, which was a great success.” 

The team did run into some struggles when planning the campaign, mainly with upping the campaign from previous years according to Anna Murphy-Pociask, the president of PRSSA on campus.

“Some of the bigger struggles we ran into when planning the campaign were making it more creative and unique from previous years,” she said. “We received first place last year, so we have a big standard to uphold.”

As for the campaign, Murphy-Pociask said her favorite part was working with her team. 

“My favorite part of this campaign was working with my awesome PRSSA team to help raise awareness about such an important and life-changing topic,” she said. 

After working with her team and doing all the planning to put together the campaign, they hosted a tabling event on April 25 in Sage Hall.

“The day-long event is a tabling event where we share meaningful conversations and information with people on campus and in the community,” Murphy-Pociask said. 

At the tabling, they ask the student body questions related to organ donation.

“We ask questions such as, ‘Are you a current state organ donor?’ as well as ‘Would you like to sign up to save up to eight lives and help people in need of organs?’” Murphy-Pociask said. “If they show us that they signed up to be a national organ and tissue donor, they receive a ‘Launch Life’ themed cookie.”

The event engaged students going to and from class, which was the goal of the campaign according to Nunez. 

“The event went really well, and we had a great turnout,” she said.