Office of Public Relations
The Office of Public Relations at Portland Community College amplifies PCC’s story by creating engaging content for diverse audiences across multiple platforms. Through media relations, strategic communications and collaborations with local and national outlets, the team enhances PCC’s visibility, supports key initiatives and promotes the value of community colleges through Op-Eds, advertorials, and college-wide communications.
Awards
In 2026, the PCC Public Relations Team won a national NCMPR Paragon Bronze Award for its communication campaign centered on the 2025 commencement ceremony. In addition, PCC PR took home four regional awards (one Gold, two Silvers and one Bronze) at the NCMPR District 7 Conference in 2025. The team won for its work on promoting commencement, Black History Month, Bob the Dog’s visits to the college’s Veterans Resource Centers and PCC’s mobile welding initiative.
The PR Team
Analytics
The Office of Public Relations manages the news and media relations to support the brand experience in the digital space.
March Media & Web
Most viewed features from pcc.edu published in the past quarter (January 1- March 31).
Mission Implausible: Student Saves PCC $143K
A PCC student intern uncovered water billing errors, consolidated accounts, identified unused meters, and secured discounts, generating $143,000 in annual savings and $50,000 in credits. His work, alongside staff, also helped the college avoid more than $1 million in added utility costs this fiscal year.
African Film Festival Brings Global Stories to PCC
The 36th Cascade Festival of African Films celebrated Black History Month with 18 free films from 16 countries. The festival highlighted cultural connection, women filmmakers, family programming, documentaries, and African diaspora storytelling through cinema, discussion, art and community events.
Music Prodigy Was Born to Strum
Student Grace Stramel discovered her passion for guitar through campus music classes, transforming curiosity into a career goal. Supported by faculty mentors, she gained confidence, improved academically, and now plans to transfer to Portland State to study music education and eventually teach guitar to others.
Featured Campaigns
This academic year, professionals in the Office of Public Relations will complete hundreds of projects in support of college initiatives and priorities. Part of the team’s work includes overseeing communications campaigns that highlight important work at PCC.?
2026 Graduates & Commencement
Once again, the PR Team will showcase the top students planning to graduate this June. We will produce stories featuring the college’s soon-to-be graduates and their degrees, skills and variety of backgrounds and talents. Plus, how do these freshly minted alums have an impact on our local economy.
Music Excellence (2025-26)
PCC has a renowned Music Program that spans two comprehensive campuses — Rock Creek and Sylvania. The campaign is highlighting the excellent faculty, performance opportunities, events and classes that the program provides to students to fulfill transfer credits to four-year universities.
First-Year Experience (2025-26)
The PR Team is showcasing how PCC is providing support and a sense of belonging to students in their first year at PCC through the First-Year Experience initiative. The campaign spotlights current and past students as well as core staff who are creating a welcoming and resourceful first year for new students.
Newberg Center Rebranding (2025-26)
As the Newberg Center re-imagines its classes and services for the Newberg and Sherwood areas, the team is introducing the people and classes that are being offered at the center during the 2025-26 academic year.
Media Relations
PCC’s Office of Public Relations is in charge of coordinating all official media outreach for the college. The team serves as the point of contact for all members of the media as well as any PCC employees wishing to promote their accomplishments, special projects or programs.
Media Training — Visit the Training Page
Department Media Relations Policy
Resources for Media
Data Notes
Data for this page is managed by the Public Relations Team with assistance from marketing and Web Team. Definitions are common across the public relations and analytics community. Questions about this data? Contact jghill@pcc.edu
News and Storytelling
Three primary content vehicles are used by the Office of Public Relations for storytelling and news publishing on the pcc.edu domain.
- PCC News – We deliver timely, trustworthy news to connect you to the impact that Portland Community College has on your life, your community and your world. PCC News offers exclusive coverage of developments on and around our campuses, programs or initiatives, local and regional issues, and honors and accomplishments. Includes content published at /news/.
- Featured Stories – Stories reflect the strengths and vitality of PCC. This content emphasizes student success, faculty excellence and other aspects of the PCC Panther experience that appeal to future students and other key audiences. For all of our features and posts, we use WordPress.
- Panther Pride – Published four times a year in partnership with the PCC Foundation, the Panther Pride e-Newsletter helps you stay up to date on college news, events, people, fundraising opportunities, and more. To sign up visit, /foundation/what-we-do/alumni/panther-pride-newsletter/
Media Placements
PCC uses Meltwater to track media placements across news sites and social media. Media placements include online newspaper outlets, television and radio.
- Media placement – An article, as defined by the Meltwater platform: a piece of published content that contains a headline, content and a publish date.
- National distribution outlets – News outlets that have a national, rather than local distribution. For our purposes, national distribution outlets are limited to those based in the United States and do not include international outlets.
Web Traffic
Portland Community College uses Google Analytics to track web traffic and behaviors across the pcc.edu domain.
- User – An individual person browsing your website (technically, a unique browser cookie). Each user can visit your website multiple times, for example, 1 user could create 3 sessions on your website, with each session containing multiple pageviews.
- Unique Pageviews – Counts a page once even if it was viewed multiple times within a single session. For example, if someone landed on your homepage, then viewed the ‘about us’ page and then navigated back to your homepage, the homepage would have 1 unique pageview (even though the page was viewed twice during the session).
- Devices & Platform – This refers to what kind of device a user was on when accessing our content. We also track how they got to the story, such as via social media, website or other.