The partnership between Fitchburg State University Associate Professor Kyle Moody’s public relations, social media, and advertising campaign class and the Worcester County District Attorney’s office continues to grow.
For the second consecutive year, one of Moody’s classes spent the fall semester designing multimedia collateral for District Attorney Joseph D. Early Jr.’s public relations campaign, “Eyes Up, Phones Down.”
This year’s Fitchburg State class took the campaign to a higher level by broadening its driving focus to also include pedestrians and cyclist safety, while encouraging safety for all mobile phone users.
Early sat in the middle of Moody’s classroom in Conlon Hall, and watched and listened to new and fresh ideas, as students delivered impactful presentations for the social media, public relations and video teams. (View scenes from the presentation on the university’s Burg Blog.)
“The work you did here is incredible and so impressive,” said Early. “I’m really blown away. They have so much creativity and passion. There’s stuff here that we’d never think of. I can’t tell you how much I love this. This is one of the best moments I’ve had as DA, coming in and seeing this stuff.”
Early said that if they incorporate this collateral the right way, they’re going to get a ton of attention.
“If you incorporate a few of these ideas and it works in different ways for different people, you’re going to save lives,” Early said. “It’s not an exaggeration. You’re going to save lives, you’re going to save serious injuries. The hardest part of my job is talking to people in pain. I’ve sat down with so many families, and it’s so sad.
“This project helps us fight an epidemic,” he said. “Everything about this was so strong.”
Moody said that his students put in a lot of hard work, long hours and revision after revision, to eventually produce professional collateral.
“We’re preparing students for the jobs of tomorrow,” said Moody. “This team has worked as hard as they can for the past three months. They’ve been dedicated.”
The “Eyes Up, Phones Down” campaign encourages drivers to enable the “Do Not Disturb” feature on their cellphones.
“You see people on their phone all the time,” said senior Communications Media major Lauren Ruffing of Woburn. “I wasn’t aware of that until I did this project, and now I’m hyper aware of it. Even on the way here during my hour commute, I put my phone on ‘Do Not Disturb.’ It felt right. It’s made me more aware and more conscious.”
Jessica Lee, a senior from Ashburnham, was a member of the public relations team that developed a press release, conducted interviews and led the communications between the three teams, the DA and outreach to the public.
“I think the things that we created are so catered towards the target audience,” said Lee. “It’s very captive and people would stop to watch this. Hopefully they can resonate with the message.”
Added Ruffing: “It’s really hard for someone to feel an emotion when they haven’t personally been affected, but we’re trying to get as close to that as we can. We want to resonate with the audience and make them feel.”
Lee said that the opportunity to help create professional content was an unbelievable learning experience.
“Practicing this professionalism and trying to convey such an important message in such an important way, I think is good for us to get that practice,” said Lee. “I think it means a lot to us because it’s so important that we wanted to make sure we did as well as we could.”
Students collected data about vehicle, bicycle and pedestrian injuries in the city of Worcester. In the presentation, it states that the Governors Highway Safety Association data shows that 56 percent of Worcester's severe or fatal crashes occur on just 7 percent of its streets.
“I learned a lot about the statistics in Worcester,” said Ruffing. “I didn’t know any of that before doing this. It was all alarming.”
The main goal of the social media team was to create visually eye-catching posts that resonate with the target audiences. They wanted the content to be appealing to all age groups, and achieved this by taking a light-hearted approach to educating people about the risks of distracted driving/walking through the use of motifs, such as vintage phones and filter grain.
“We wanted to focus on creating something really visually different from what had already existed on their social media,” said senior Kyle Karaca, of Washington. “We wanted to create very illustrative, exciting designs that really stick out that included different locations in Worcester in the background, people of different abilities, diverse people talking about being safe as a pedestrian, as well as a driver. We want them to not be distracted with their phone and not distracted in general.”
The social team produced several eye-catching designs, and a catchy slogan, “Your Phone Can Wait, Your Life Can’t.”
The primary focus of the video team was to focus on long-form content, specifically created for YouTube where it can thrive.
“I’m very proud of our team; it was a huge team effort between all of us,” said senior Jesye Nortey of Worcester. “I hope this message gets across to as many people as possible, to hopefully save lives. The more accidents we can reduce in the public and try to save as many lives as possible the better.”
Lee said that Moody has been a steadying force in the classroom, helping each student strengthen work habits, while learning and growing in a professional setting during this campaign.
“Professor Moody is a very good leader, a very good teacher,” said Lee. “He always guides us in a good direction. His guidance has been impactful.”