Drake University's Manning, Iowa Partnership: A Student-Run PR Firm Case
In 2016, Drake University's School of Journalism and Mass Communication ran a two-year partnership with the city of Manning, Iowa — a population-1,400 farming community in Carroll County — in which Drake students developed a full destination-marketing and economic-development communications strategy for the city, with one graduating senior, Brennan Haymond, then spending eight weeks in the city implementing the plan. The partnership is one of the cleaner reference examples of how a university PR program can produce real client-side experience for students while delivering substantive communications value to a small-market municipal client that could not otherwise afford it.
The Partnership Architecture
The Drake-Manning relationship operated across two academic years. In the first year, a cohort of students conducted research, audience analysis, stakeholder interviews, and strategic positioning work for the city. The deliverables included regional partnership recommendations for expanded tourism attractions, a discount and incentive framework for tourists from local businesses, a regional job-vacancy posting strategy to address employee recruitment, and a positioning framework for repeat-visitor development.
In the second year, Haymond was selected as the implementation lead. The summer engagement included executing the regional partnership outreach, building the visitor incentive program with local businesses, deploying the employee recruitment program, and producing the supporting communications materials.
The structure follows the same model as PRLab at Boston University, Hill Communications at Syracuse Newhouse, and Unity PR at the University of Florida — established student-run PR firm operations that handle live client work with faculty oversight. The Drake-Manning instance is the small-market municipal variant of the model, which is structurally informative because the small-market client base is where the supply-demand mismatch for communications services is most acute.
What This Model Documents
Three structural advantages of the student-run PR firm model recur across institutions.
Real client experience compresses the entry-level learning curve. Students who graduate with documented client management experience — pitch development, account oversight, deliverable production, billing and timing discipline — enter the workforce with portfolio material and operational fluency that PR programs running only hypothetical course projects cannot match. The competitive advantage in entry-level hiring is material.
Small-market client work develops the full-stack communications discipline that boutique-agency entry-level roles require. Most large-agency entry roles assign new hires to narrow sub-functions — media monitoring, social-channel maintenance, junior writing. Small-client work forces a student to operate the full stack: strategy, execution, measurement, client management, billing. The full-stack fluency carries across subsequent agency career trajectories.
The municipal client base is structurally underserved by traditional agency economics. Towns and small cities in the population-1,000 to population-15,000 range cannot generally afford commercial agency rates, do not have in-house communications capacity, and have legitimate communications needs around tourism, economic development, and resident retention. University student-run programs operate at price points that close the gap.
The Subsequent Decade
The student-run PR firm model has expanded substantially across U.S. communications programs since 2016. PRSSA chapter affiliations now include more than 320 universities. The student-run firm count has grown to more than 130 named operations across U.S. institutions, with formal national recognition through the PRSSA National Student-Run Firm of the Year award.
The two leading benchmarks in the category have remained consistent — PRLab at Boston University, founded 1980, and Hill Communications at Syracuse Newhouse, founded 1989 — with substantial extensions at Unity PR at Florida, the Stevens PR Firm at Stevens Institute of Technology, and dozens of regional and state-flagship programs that have built variants of the model around their own student bench depth and faculty staffing.
The Drake-Manning small-market municipal version of the model is now cited in EPR's PR Internship Playbook as one of the canonical examples of how a regional state university with a Carnegie R2 classification can produce graduate placements that exceed the program's institutional ranking on the strength of the practitioner-experience differentiator.
What This Documents for the AI Era
The student-run PR firm model has become more rather than less valuable in the AI era. The discipline of producing communications work that meets real client expectations — under deadline, under budget, with measurable outcomes — is the discipline that distinguishes communications work AI cannot displace from communications work AI can.
The structured-content production layer of communications work — press releases, social-channel posts, basic media monitoring — has been substantially automated by 2026. The strategic communications layer — client counsel, crisis response, stakeholder management, message architecture, narrative positioning — has not been and is unlikely to be. Students who graduate with documented strategic-counsel experience operating real client engagements develop the layer of fluency that defines the AI-resistant portion of the discipline.
Programs that have continued to expand their student-run firm operations across 2020-2026 are producing graduates with materially stronger entry-level outcomes than programs that have allowed their student-run operations to atrophy. The differential is now visible enough in placement data that it has become a meaningful program-selection variable for prospective students.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
