Public Relations Team

The main purpose of the Public Relations Team is to be the public face of AguaClara and raise awareness about international water related issues--specifically, the quest to provide access to safe drinking water.  On this page, our public relations group outlines how AguaClara strives to meet these goals.

To gain awareness and exposure for the AguaClara cause, the Public Relations team works at making posters and giving presentations to many interested parties around campus including the Global Health Student Council and the ENGRD 1050 seminars. The Outreach Team has participated in Campus Sustainability Day, Ithaca's annual Into The Streets--a city-wide volunteer service day, . The team has organized benefit concerts at the Nines in Collegetown. We also sent press releases to a multitude of local media outlets including the Cornell Daily Sun, Cornell Chronicle and the Ithaca Journal. We plan to contact area schools and community groups to arrange presentations and lessons for local students. We will facilitate these presentations but everyone on the team will be required to attend. In order to make this efficient we can develop a generic lesson plan that can be used and modified depending on the situation.

Educational materials have been designed for AguaClara. We have developed Sponsorship Materials, Brochures, and Info Sheets along with other promotional materials. As part of getting our name seen around campus, we have designed and printed posters and created t-shirts in past semesters. For the web, a new website has been designed and the wiki is being restructured. The website has been translated to Spanish. We are in the process of getting banners for tabling events. Also, a new brochure and sponsorship packet were created by current Public Relations team members in Spring 2013.

Tau Beta Pi also had a technical fair during Cornell Days at which AguaClara tabled and gained lots of incoming freshman exposure.

Recruiting

We will work to recruit other people based on skills needed. This includes promoting AguaClara within the Civil Engineering Department, the College of Engineering and also to different departments around Cornell. Potential examples include someone with video editing and graphic/web design experience for the website, blog, and informational materials, people from biological or health related departments to organize measures of the effectiveness of our efforts, and people from social development departments to study how our efforts are affecting local communities and populations. We will make presentations to ENGRD classes and to other organizations that have expressed interest around campus, advertise in the Sundial, and put up posters in various places on campus. Also, presentations will be made to high school and middle school aged students who are developing interests in engineering. We can also table on North Campus at RPCC or on Ho Plaza.

Recruitment material and Public Relations Team Tools can be found by browsing Outreach Resources. 

Website

The website is a crucial component of AguaClara because it is typically the first point of contact for outsiders.  Our team created the public website in Spring 2010 in order to create a better relationship between the AguaClara Team and the general public.  We plan on using this resource to streamline the process for keeping past and current members updated on AguaClara progress and to help educate possible sponsors about our project.  The site is also used to provide general information about AguaClara, advertise for fundraising events, highlight the recent achievements, centralize a channel for online donations, and spotlight team members who are currently working on projects.

We face many obstacles in refining and updating our website.  Our complete guide to utilizing and improving the site can be found at the Website Resources page.

In Fall 2010, several changes were made to the website, including its translation into Spanish. Aguaclara had been using Google translator to reach to the Spanish speaking community. However, it was crucial to have an independent website designed specifically for people interested in Aguaclara but with no knowledge of English. Since Aguaclara's technology was designed for Latin American communities, website translation was a priority for the outreach team. We worked with a native speaker, and the website is complete and went live in January 2010.

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