Student stories that earned Time and NBC Nightly News
Western Governors University lets students advance by proving what they know rather than by logging classroom hours. We led with the people it works for: the working adults who finished their degrees.
Scope
Agency of record for PR and social media for ten years: national and regional media relations, media training, design and video production, and internal communications.
Challenge
WGU is a non-profit, competency-based online university, which in media terms is three disadvantages at once. Online education was crowded with for-profit operators whose reputation coloured the whole category. Competency-based learning needs explaining before it can be admired. And a non-profit does not have an advertising budget to buy its way past either problem.
Pitched as an institution, WGU was a policy story a general-assignment reporter would decline.
What we did
So we did not pitch the institution. We pitched the students.
Crier built the program on inspiring student stories sourced from across the country: working adults, parents, career changers, people finishing degrees they had started decades earlier. A local reporter who will not write about an education model will write about someone in their own circulation area whose life changed, and a national desk will take the same story when enough of them add up to a trend.
Underneath the human stories we made WGU’s use of technology the second angle, giving education and business reporters something structural to write about once the student story had earned their attention.
Results
Crier secured editorial placements in hundreds of news outlets across the decade.
National coverage included Time, NBC Nightly News, NPR, USA Today, the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, CNN and MSNBC, with regional wins in the markets where prospective students actually live, which for an online university is every market at once.
Beyond placements
A ten-year relationship is not only media relations. Crier media-trained WGU’s spokespeople so they could carry the story on camera, produced design and video work including the media reels above, and ran internal PR so staff and faculty heard the news before the press did.
Where it landed
The short answers
What did Crier Communications do for Western Governors University?
Crier Communications was WGU’s agency of record for PR and social media for ten years, covering national and regional media relations, media training, design and video production, and internal communications.
What coverage did WGU earn?
Hundreds of editorial placements across the decade, including Time, NBC Nightly News, NPR, USA Today, the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, CNN and MSNBC, alongside regional wins in the markets where prospective students live.
How do you get press coverage for a university?
Pitch the students, not the institution. A reporter who will not write about a competency-based learning model will write about someone in their own circulation area whose life changed, and a national desk will take the same story once enough of them add up to a trend.
What is competency-based education?
A model in which students progress by demonstrating mastery of a subject rather than by time spent in class. Western Governors University is a non-profit online university built on that approach.
Case studies
LessonLab
A UCLA research story timed to the TIMSS release, and a 2003 Pearson acquisition.
Dole Nutrition Institute
Executive positioning inside the national childhood obesity conversation.
Wild Planet Foods
3,603 placements and 44 awards across a decade as agency of record.
Let us tell your story
Twenty years of earning coverage for CPG food, home and wellness brands.
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