The Media School

PRIME opportunity for PR Masters student

12 May 2010

BU student Vanessa Procter has won the UK’s first Grunig PRIME Research Fellowship.

Vanessa, who is studying for a Master’s degree in Public Relations at BU, will spend her six-week fellowship in Oxford with PRIME Research, a global leader in strategic communications. She will also receive a £4,000 stipend and be given the opportunity to investigate the tactics used by PR practitioners when conducting campaigns for environmentally-sustainable products, services and companies.

In particular, Vanessa will follow her passion for the environment by authoring a paper which will focus on green PR agencies and the strategies they use to gain and maintain public trust in their PR campaigns. The paper will be published by the Institute for Public Relations.

“I’m very excited to have won this incredible Fellowship and I’m looking forward to working with a major firm like PRIME Research”, said the 23 year old originally from Tunbridge Wells in Kent.

“I’m passionate about the environment and very interested in ensuring that PR professionals use tactics and conduct campaigns that promote sustainability and ultimately help consumers and others who are targeted by those campaigns to make informed decisions, particularly where environmental issues are concerned”, Vanessa continued.

The Fellowship, named for James and Larissa Grunig, is presented by the Institute and sponsored by PRIME Research. Together, the Grunigs have written or edited 10 books and each have published over 200 other works on PR theory and research. They have also lectured in 43 countries, won nearly every major award for PR educators and advised hundreds of Masters and Doctoral students.

“Our congratulations to Vanessa. We’re very proud of her achievement in being awarded this very prestigious Fellowship”, said Professor Tom Watson, Deputy Dean of BU’s Media School. “This Fellowship was only offered to students on three programmes in the UK because of their quality which puts our Master’s programme in Public Relations amongst the country’s elite.”

PRIME Research, founded in 1985 in Mainz, Germany, combines academic rigour with practical relevance to provide a broad array of research and consulting services to many of the world's greatest organizations. The firm employs approximately 500 analysts and 100 consultants in eight locations around the world with U.S. operations in Ann Arbor, Michigan.