Summary:

The Corporate Communication Project asks students to identify a real-world corporate crisis that has occurred within the last five years, analyze its causes and effects, and respond to it with multiple documents. (The class will examine the grounding of several JetBlue airplanes due to ice storms in February 2007 as a case study.) Students will position themselves as part of a corporation's public relations team and produce a variety of separate but related materials for distinct audiences:

• a Crisis Analysis Report for corporate executives
• a Press Release for news media outlets
• an Internal Memo email for employees
• a Video Message for customers

All of these materials should address the crisis in a professional, ethical, rhetorically-effective manner. Materials will be submitted electronically as email attachments and links.

It is likely that some of the corporate crises students select already have corresponding materials available online. This may present the temptation to borrow heavily from these documents while constructing materials for this project. However, this project requires students to produce original work, so I will check for similarities between any official and student versions of these texts. (This of course does not mean that students are forbidden to draw rhetorical strategies from official materials or other models.)

Deliverables:

1. Crisis Analysis Report (20% of project grade)
2. Press Release (20% of project grade)
3. Internal Memo (20% of project grade)
4. Video Message (20% of project grade)
5. Materials Analysis (10% of project grade)
6. Postmortem (10% of project grade)