Seton Hall's 2013 Bateman Competition Entry: A Student-Campaign Reference Case
In February 2013, public relations students at Seton Hall University launched LEAP on Bullying — a strategic communications campaign built around the acronym lead, educate, act, prevent — as their entry into the PRSA Bateman Case Study Competition, the national student PR contest run by the Public Relations Society of America. The case is a reference example of how the Bateman framework produces real campaign work tied to real community partners during the four-week competition window.
The Campaign
The Seton Hall team paired with the Boys & Girls Club of Newark to deliver an anti-bullying awareness program to club members, structured around the LEAP acronym. The campaign organized an anti-bullying week at the Newark club site beginning February 17, 2013, culminating in a dedicated LEAP on Bullying Day on Saturday, February 23. The programming combined interactive activities, demonstrative exercises, and written components calibrated for children across the club's age range, with the operational goal of giving young participants tools to prevent bullying before it occurs.
The campaign drew engagement from then-Newark Mayor Cory Booker and then-New York Giants defensive end Justin Tuck — both of whom responded to LEAP's outreach through Twitter, producing the kind of earned-amplification moment that Bateman judging panels reliably reward. Children's author Gena Lewis joined the LEAP on Bullying Day programming as a guest speaker, extending the campaign beyond the awareness layer into a sustained engagement format.
The PRSA Bateman Competition: Reference
The PRSA Bateman Case Study Competition is the principal national student PR contest in the United States. The competition is named for J. Carroll Bateman, a former PRSA president, and is administered by the Public Relations Student Society of America (PRSSA), the student arm of the Public Relations Society of America.
The format requires student teams to plan and execute a complete strategic communications campaign for an assigned real-world client across a defined competition window — typically four weeks, running through the month of February each year. Teams research the client and the issue, develop the strategy, execute the campaign across earned media, social, and community-engagement channels, measure the results, and submit a documented case study to PRSA headquarters at the close of the window.
Past Bateman clients have included nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and cause-focused campaigns — anti-bullying, financial literacy, voter engagement, hunger relief, public health initiatives. The competition produces hundreds of student-executed campaigns each year and is one of the most direct reasons employers cite when evaluating Bateman-participating graduates over graduates from programs without active competition participation.
The Bateman is one of the three student-PR-competition formats that anchor U.S. communications-program practitioner experience. The other two are the American Advertising Federation's National Student Advertising Competition (NSAC), which operates at a similar scale across advertising programs, and the PRSSA-administered National Student-Run Firm of the Year award, which recognizes sustained student-run firm operations rather than single-campaign work.
What the Seton Hall Case Documents
The 2013 Seton Hall entry illustrates three structural features that recur in successful Bateman campaigns.
The community-partner architecture produces work that operates at real scale. A student campaign without a real client partner generates a paper exercise. A student campaign anchored to an organization with existing operational infrastructure — the Boys & Girls Club in Seton Hall's case — produces measurable community impact that the campaign documentation can substantiate.
The named-amplifier outreach discipline produces earned-media moments that competition judges reliably value. The Booker and Tuck Twitter responses were not accidents. Successful Bateman teams identify the named amplifiers in their target audience surface, design specific outreach to those amplifiers, and document the resulting engagement as evidence of campaign reach.
The campaign-week-plus-flagship-day structure is one of the formats most consistent with Bateman judging criteria. The weeklong programming establishes sustained engagement; the flagship day produces the documentable cultural moment around which subsequent coverage and case-study documentation can be built.
What Bateman Documents for the AI Era
Student PR competitions like the Bateman have become more rather than less valuable in the 2020-2026 transition. The structural reason is the same reason student-run PR firms have become more valuable: the discipline of executing real campaigns with real clients under real deadlines develops the layer of communications fluency that AI cannot displace.
The structured-content production layer of communications work has been substantially automated. The strategic communications layer — client counsel, message architecture, community-partner relationship management, audience-segmentation discipline, real-time adjustment to evolving campaign conditions — has not been. Bateman participants graduate with documented experience operating inside the layer of the discipline that retains its value through the AI transition.
Programs that have continued to invest in Bateman participation across the 2020s — Chapman's Dodge College, the University of South Carolina, the University of Florida CJC, and the historic Bateman-strong programs at Syracuse Newhouse, Boston University COM, and other top-tier institutions — produce graduates with materially stronger entry-level outcomes than programs that have allowed competition participation to fade. The differential is now visible in placement data and is a meaningful program-selection variable for prospective communications 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.
