Professor Harman's Strategic Communications capstone students at The Waag, Nieuwmarkt Square, Amsterdam, along with their agency mentors and chaperones. (Photo credit: Shawn Ragsdale)
Students in the WVU Reed School of Media and Communications were enlisted by Goals House, the advocacy arm of Freuds Communications, to engage young people in initiatives related to water cleanliness, access and sanitation. One group of students proposed a winning strategy to cut through Gen Z’s compassion fatigue and make them “Give a Sh*t.”
Not just a class, but a full agency experience
For the past 12 years, Adjunct Professor of Advertising and Public Relations Charles Harman has provided opportunities for students in his Strategic Communications capstone class to work with global clients who are dealing with real-world problems.
“I worked for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the largest national nonprofit related to mental illness, for 27 years. I went to Europe a ton for that job, and I would meet advocacy groups and get to know people,” said Harman.
Harman has leveraged those contacts to recruit non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and nonprofits as clients for his students. The clients write up a request for proposal and capstone students work within their classroom “agencies” to create a communications strategy to tackle it, competing to produce the winning pitch.
“I didn't expect this class to be as fun and bring me as close to so many people as it did,” said Sophie Stanley, an Advertising and Public Relations major who is pursuing an accelerated BS+MS degree in Integrated Marketing Communications. “Everyone always talks about studying abroad and how fun it is. And that was a major appeal to this class, also. Who doesn't want to travel with a group of your friends?”
“It's so hands on. I think it was one of the first times a professor was like, ‘Listen, this is your guys’ work. I'm just here to keep you on the rails,’ then let us go full steam ahead, with full creative control,” said Aaron Elliott, a 2026 graduate of the Advertising and Public Relations program.
“It didn't really feel like a class,” added Stanley. “It felt like a full agency experience, where it was a job.”
Depending on the year, Harman’s capstone students travel abroad to either conduct research for their campaigns or to make pitches in-person to the clients. So far, there have been 10 trips overseas—nine to Europe and one to Brazil.
The Strategic Communications capstone students at the European Parliament Hemicycle in Brussels, Belgium. (Photo credit: Shawn Ragsdale)
Each student agency is assigned a WVU Reed School alumni mentor. This year’s mentors included Chad Hyett (BSJ, 2001), executive vice president of MSC Health; Brandon Thomas (BSJ, 2010), executive vice president of Freuds Communications (New York City); and Maddie Ernst (BSJ, 2019), marketing manager for UC Health in Cincinnati.
“My role is less about giving them answers and more about helping them think differently— challenging them, asking questions and helping them put the pieces together,” said Hyett, who has been serving as a mentor for Harman’s capstone students for more than a decade. “I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’m still amazed at how differently people think before they’ve spent years in the industry. They see opportunities and make connections that I never would, and I learn just as much from them as they do from me.”
This was Thomas’ sixth year working with Harman’s class. He loves that every year he gets to work with a new group of eager students, but he also gets to reconnect with Harman and the other mentors.
“The magic of this class sits in the intersection between what happens in the classroom and what happens in the real world,” said Thomas. “Every year you see how the experience is changing students’ perceptions on what it’s like to work in PR, and my hope is that it gives a little more clarity as students navigate next steps as they prepare to graduate.”
Rising to the occasion
During the spring 2026 semester, the Strategic Communications capstone students worked with Freuds Communications, a global integrated marketing agency based in London, and, more specifically, Freuds’ Goals House.
“As a part of considering where I could add more value, Chuck and I discussed Freuds’ Goal House event programming serving as a client, given its focus on mission-driven and purpose-driven work,” said Thomas.
Freuds and Goals House asked the students to develop a 360-integrated global campaign to raise awareness and action around one of three areas: lack of access to safe drinking water; aging or inadequate infrastructure; or poor sanitation and hygiene. They wanted upbeat campaigns that targeted people in the 18- to 40-year-old range.
As a class, the students decided to gear their campaigns toward Gen Z, identifying it as the demographic they were most well-equipped to reach.
“When we first went over the RFP, we were like, they’re asking a bunch of college students to make a campaign to fix the global water crisis. How are we going to do this?” said Stanley.
The class divided into three agencies:
New River Solutions included Payton Ogden as account manager; Allison Peters as creative director; Lauren Taylor and Lauren DeFerro as strategic planners; Giovanni Dicerbo and Sarah Grace Esposito as PR and communications executives; and Kara Edstrom and Kendall Heffernan as digital and social executives, with Ernst as their mentor. Their campaign, “It Starts with Water,” centered on raising awareness and encouraging advocacy for universal access to clean drinking water.
Blue Coast Creative included Devyn Hussey as account manager; Kaeyln Pavlick as creative director; Katie Vesey and Regan Cassady as strategic planners; Nick Johnson and Monte Piervencenti as digital and social media executives; and Maggie Hurst and Dylan Mitchell as PR and communications executives, with Thomas as their mentor. Their campaign, “The Flow of Life,” explored how aging and crumbling infrastructure threatens access to clean water.
Half Full included Sophie Stanley as the account manager; Aaron Elliott as the creative director; Sam Goodwin and Kyleigh Nash as strategic planners; Faith Gregory and Kiley Rosser as PR and communications executives; and Nora Boggess and Hailie Tritschler as digital and social media executives, with Hyett as their mentor. Their campaign “Give a Sh*t,” focused on advocating for sanitation and hygiene in communities where such things are unreliable or nonexistent.
Because of Thomas’ connection to Freuds Communications, all mentor information was omitted from the final presentations, and none of the mentors joined the consultations with Freuds representatives.
“Ensuring that there was no bias was an incredibly important part of the process for me,” Thomas said. “I didn’t want students to assume that because we were working with my place of employment that my student agency would win. In the end, Freuds had no idea which mentor worked with which group.”
Each agency researched their specific area, and several guest speakers presented to the class at WVU, including the Chief of Communications for American Water and Head of Policy and Government Affairs for Lixil Corporation.
The Strategic Communications capstone class watches a video on the history of windmills at the Museum Mill in Schermerhorn, North Holland. (Photo credit: Shawn Ragsdale)
The research part of the capstone class concluded with a trip to the Netherlands and Belgium to learn from international water experts. Slightly more than half of the class joined Harman and all three mentors on the study abroad trip during the week of Spring Break.
In the Netherlands, students visited a water engineering college in Delft and spoke with a panel of experts at IRC Wash in The Hague. They also visited Amsterdam, Leiden and Haarlem and toured a 17th century windmill to see first-hand how the country has managed water for hundreds of years.
In Belgium, students traveled through Brussels and Bruges, including a visit to the European Union Parliament in Brussels.
“It wasn’t until we talked to the professionals in the industry that it really started to click. Because you can do as much reading as you want, but talking to people is what really makes you understand,” said Stanley.
“When you’re talking to people who are actually doing the thing, you get excited. You can’t help but be excited about what you’re doing. I didn't think I'd ever be at the pub with a group of people talking about water so passionately, but we were,” said Ellilott. “The group bonding was worth its weight in gold.”
A winning campaign to make people ‘Give a Sh*t’
During the early brainstorming process, the Half Full team explored the use of “give a sh*t”—an attention-grabbing wordplay that referenced their hygiene and sanitation area of focus.
“One of the statistics Freuds gave us is that 3.4 billion people lack access to a safe toilet,” said Elliott. “That’s shocking, and that drew me in.”
“I felt like a toilet campaign was a unique angle,” he continued. “It's such a universal experience at this point. If we talk about a pipe, my relationship to a pipe is so distant. But not having a toilet? Everyone has had a moment when they couldn’t get to a toilet when they needed one. That’s something everybody can relate to.”
Gen Z lives in a world of digital noise, bombarded from all sides all day, every day. That includes plenty of jarring content asking them to care about everything from war and famine to climate change and natural disasters. The Half Full team knew they needed to be provocative and daring to break through the noise.
“The best campaigns don’t come from the flashiest concepts. They come from deeply understanding the audience, asking the right questions and staying curious. That’s the real work. Great creativity is built on strategy. If you get the strategy right, the creativity has somewhere meaningful to go.” Chad Hyett
At one point, Half Full envisioned a gritty, guerilla-style campaign that included placing toilets around Times Square in New York City to grab people’s attention. However, the students had learned from their research that while Gen Z is one of the most politically informed demographics, young people need specific, local, tangible calls-to-action to overcome the compassion fatigue.
The more Half Full learned about the wide-ranging issues related to water and sanitation, the more overwhelming Freuds’ request felt.
“After doing all this research, it felt like we were dealing with 20 different issues, and I wished I could just do one at a time. Like, I wish Freuds had asked us to solve a problem for a specific community instead of the whole thing,” said Elliott. “Then I was like, ‘OK. Maybe let’s just do that.’”
While they were in Belgium, Elliott suggested using a case study in their campaign. That resonated with Stanley, whose hometown of McDowell County, West Virginia, has been plagued by unclean water and limited access for decades.
“We wanted to make sure that Gen Z realizes there are still people in America who don’t have access to tap water or clean drinking water,” Stanley said. “This is happening in their backyard. We wanted to emphasize that this is a big issue that affects everyone,” said Stanley.
The pieces of their campaign started to come together: The brash and bold title “Give a Sh*t” to disrupt the endless cycle of doomscrolling, paired with tangible examples that put human faces on abstract problems. They didn’t want to just raise awareness—they wanted to generate action.
From there, they crafted their tagline: “The world’s sh*t isn’t solved all at once. It’s one community at a time.”
Shortly after the trip to Belgium and the Netherlands, the agencies had another check-in with Freuds and pitched several ideas. The Freuds team liked Half Full’s case study idea and advised them to go with what they know.
“After that chat, we knew we had to go to McDowell County,” said Stanley.
That moment when everything clicks is what Hyett looks forward to every year when he mentors an agency.
“There's usually a point where a team stops thinking like students trying to complete an assignment and starts thinking like professionals solving a real business problem,” he said. “Students are often so worried about hitting the project out of the park, but I’ve been doing this long enough to trust the process. I know they’ll get there.”
Sophie Stanley (left, standing) speaks to a gathering of her classmates and Delft engineering students at The Social Hub. (Photo credit: Shawn Ragsdale)
A case study in creating empathy
Much of Stanley’s family still lives in McDowell County, which was recently featured in a “60 Minutes” news segment that touched on cuts to public assistance programs and the unusable tap water. Harman shared the 13-minute feature with his capstone class, but Stanley had already watched it with her family. When Harman learned Stanley was from the area, he asked her to share some of her first-hand experience with the class. And when they were in The Hague, Netherlands, talking to international water experts, Stanley was asked to speak on the water problems in West Virginia’s southern coalfields.
“I was telling these professionals about the shotgun pipes, and every single person made a face,” she said.
“Shotgun pipes” allow homes to flush their wastewater directly into nearby bodies of water, such as creeks and rivers.
Elliott, Stanley and two of their group members traveled to McDowell County to capture video and interview residents. Stanley’s family helped with logistics, and her father acted as tour guide and chauffeur.
They interviewed a woman who lives on Burke Mountain, which has never had access to running water. She told them about hauling water and the cisterns they use to catch rainfall.
When the second planned interview fell through, Stanley’s dad drove them to a waterspout where many area residents collect water. As they filmed the water gushing from the mountainside, a man pulled up in his truck to fill a tank and gave an impromptu interview.
“It was really important to me that we weren’t exploiting their stories. Because for years, McDowell has been exploited in so many ways, so it was important that we weren't like, ‘Oh, poor them. Their lives are so hard,’” said Stanley.
“In the interviews, you can hear they love where they’re from,” she continued. “They’re proud of being from McDowell. And this is just something they’ve done their whole lives. But people in other parts of the state and the country don't know it’s happening, and no one’s making an active effort to change it.”
According to Elliott, the McDowell case study would act as an entry point for further action. As the video ends, viewers would be directed to the “Give a Sh*t” website, where people could see specific, concrete things they could do to help McDowell County’s situation.
“It’s capitalizing on that moment when people say, ‘I see this problem. I want to help him—this guy in his truck on the video.’ Instead of giving to a generic charity, the website would give specific ways you can help. The overarching campaign idea is that you would do this same case study format for multiple communities,” said Elliott.
And it worked.
About a week before showing the final campaign to Freuds, Half Full was able to present their project and video to the WVU College of Creative Arts and Media Visiting Committee, a group of alumni and professionals who serve in an advisory capacity for the College.
“Everyone was like, ‘How do we fix this? McDowell deserves a solution. We want to do something to help you fix this,’” said Stanely. “But that’s the point—our campaign isn’t necessarily about giving you an overall solution to this. It’s about making you want to act. Our goal was to create actionable change instead of just awareness.”
Freuds Communications representatives were equally impacted by the video.
Each agency in Harman’s capstone class pitched their campaigns to four executives in Freuds Communications’ London office, including CEO Arlo Brady.
“After the pitch, one woman on the Freuds London team was like, ‘I don’t really know the Appalachian history or the people there, but after watching that video, I want to help,’” said Elliott.
The “Give a Sh*t” campaign specifically uses a case study model that can be replicated and translated for communities around the world.
“You can just as easily pick a community in England that’s a couple hours outside of London to get people’s attention and help them realize it’s happening in their own backyard. That’s how you shorten the psychological distance between people and the issue,” Stanley said.
After hearing three thoughtful and well-executed pitches, Freuds Communications selected Half Full’s campaign as the winner.
“If we didn't go to McDowell, I'm not sure we would have won. That really solidified everything for us,” said Elliott.
Hyett was proud of his mentees.
“They earned it,” said Hyett. “They were curious, challenged each other, welcomed feedback and kept pushing their work until it was as strong as it could be. They also took a creative risk, which was incredible to see. Watching their confidence grow throughout the semester, then seeing that work recognized at the end, made the experience even more rewarding.”
“Be someone people want to work with. So much of work life is about bringing unique perspective or value and being collaborative, so it is important to find ways to show up in a way that works well for you and others.” Brandon Thomas
For Stanley, Elliott and the other members of Half Full, their victory was the cherry on top as they closed out their time in the WVU Reed School.
“You spend four years preparing for this—everything you learn in every class you take leads you to this point. But when you’re sitting in the little conference room at the WVU Media Innovation Center on Zoom with the CEO of Freuds and their team in London actually doing it, it’s kind of scary. But I was super proud of what we did,” said Stanley.
“Day one, first class at Reed, you start to learn things that fuel every other campaign or piece of work,” said Elliott. “I know I’ve learned some essential truths about how to tell a story that will apply to every campaign I work on.”
Learn more about the WVU Reed School of Media and Communications at mediaandcommunications.wvu.edu and follow @wvureedschool on social media.