The Southern Baptist Convention’s missional branch, North American Mission Board, and their church planting subsidiary, Send Network, failed to provide online communication guidance to help establish (or plant) new faith communities. Only 13% of Evangelical Protestants are under the age of thirty (Pew Research Center, 2015). If the Southern Baptist Convention wants their church plants to grow in a media-focused society, they must learn how to communicate with the generations who were born with technology in their hands. The purpose of this study is to identify which content and frequency Southern Baptist Churches in Metropolitan Phoenix should use to reach their target community. The project began by conducting research on twelve Send Network church plants within fifteen miles of the center of downtown Phoenix. The results led to drafting a communications and branding guideline for one of the Send Network’s church plants, Mercy Hill Church, creating a ten-week posting schedule to collect insights on content and frequency of posts, analyzing and identifying best practices for its social media strategy and tactics. The ideal posting schedule and ratio of still image and video content for Mercy Hill Church on Instagram and Facebook was revealed. Additionally, it was identified the best day of the week to publish each type of post out of these seven: community, Scripture, worship, testimony, ministry highlight, sermon recap and church invite. Overall, the project determined that a consistent and cohesive Instagram and Facebook posting schedule increased traditional college-aged student engagement with Mercy Hill Church. It also resulted in an ideal posting schedule for Southern Baptist church plants if their target audience includes traditional college-aged students.

Herbert G. Klein was one of the important political figures of the mid to late 20th Century. Born in 1918, Klein’s career spanned 63 years. He retired as Editor-in-Chief of Copley Press, a company he worked for from the start of his career as a young journalist covering an up-and-coming Richard Nixon and was active in public affairs up to his death in 2009. Klein is best known as longtime advisor to Richard Nixon, and was with Nixon at peak moments in his career, including the Checkers Speech, as well as Nixon’s 1960 and 1962 campaigns. Upon Nixon’s election as President, Klein became the White House Director of Communications, a new position Klein was tasked with designing. For four years, Klein is known as one of Nixon’s chief advisors. But then, for reasons historians never have fully explored, he disappears from Nixon’s political landscape as well as from scholarly and public prominence.

The purpose of this dissertation is to establish Herbert G. Klein as a formative figure in the Richard Nixon White House, whose contributions to Nixon’s television strategies, their subsequent impact on the President’s actions and attitudes and eventual fall, have been largely overshadowed in the scholarly literature. The work draws from previously unexplored materials on Klein in the Nixon Library. The account is notable for the first examination of Klein’s only known oral history, lessening a gap in the existing literature on Nixon’s aides and his relationship with the media.

The call-in talk radio format is one of the key formats of national talk programming. It was first thought to have originated in the early 1970s, when satellite distributed signals made national programs economical and the advent of the 1-800 telephone number allowed for cheaper long distance phone calls. However, this research reveals that the nationwide call-in format originated in 1964 by Herb Jepko, an overnight talk radio host who broadcast his show, Nitecap, from rural Salt Lake City, Utah on one of the country's most powerful clear channel stations, KSL 1160-AM. At the time Nitecap was launched, most radio executives were skeptical that national call-in talk radio could be successful. Yet, Jepko demonstrated that millions of people, awake in the late and early morning hours, were interested in listening to radio programming as well as interacting with the host and other listeners. This research examines Jepko's innovation of national call-in talk radio and the factors that contributed to his success. He altered the traditional talk radio paradigm and changed the way industry leaders viewed both the overnight time slot and national call-in talk shows. His work set the foundation for the format and paved the way for its use today.

This dissertation sought to understand how leaders in a public-private strategic alliance collaboratively address complex community problems. The study responded to the gap in academic research of leadership and public relations in alliances to solve complex social issues, as well as the scant scholarly attention to alliance leaders' communications with stakeholders. Its findings corresponded to framing theory, stakeholder theory, SWOT (strengths/weaknesses/opportunities/threats) theory, complexity theory, and the subtopic of complex leadership -- all through the lens of public relations. This investigation culminated in the introduction of the C.A.L.L. to Action Model of Community Engagement, which demonstrates the confluence of factors that were integral to the alliance's success in eliminating chronic homelessness among veterans in Maricopa County, Arizona -- Communication, Alliance, Leadership, and Leverage. This qualitative case study used the method of elite or in-depth interviews and grounded theory to investigate the factors present in a community engagement that achieved its purpose. It served as a foundation for future inquiry and contributions to the base of knowledge, including 1) additional qualitative case studies of homeless alliances in other communities or of other social issues addressed by a similar public-private alliance; 2) quantitative methods, such as a survey of the participants in this alliance to provide triangulation of the results and establish a platform for generalization of the results to a larger population.