Howard University PR Director Alonda Thomas: “We Protect the Legacy of the University”
Public relations executive Alonda Thomas left her position in entertainment at TV One to return to her passion for higher education. In January 2018, Thomas was appointed Director of Public Relations at the Howard University Office of University Communications. More recently, she was also named the Interim Vice President of Communications by Howard University President Dr. Wayne A. I. Frederick. During the next nine months, Thomas led the communications department during a critical period: its annual spring enrollment and the subsequent global outbreak of the coronavirus.
As August ushered in a new school semester, a new phase of the coronavirus pandemic, and a new season of unknowns in higher education, Howard University announced its undergraduate reopening plan to move all courses to an online format for the fall semester. During this school term, Howard will also present a variety of virtual events, including its signature homecoming celebration.
Howard University is known as the flagship HBCU because of its strong brand recognition, famous alumni across multiple industries, and notable academic programs. Thomas’ role as the Director of Public Relations is to help promote and protect the brand of Howard University, as well as spotlight subject matter experts and research being conducted at the university. Managing four senior communications specialists and two social media strategists, Thomas and her team develop public relations campaigns that tell the story of Howard University to prospective students and alumni. Thomas is also a speechwriter for the president.
“Howard University has a strong undergraduate program and offers a unique array of training in professional programs including law, medicine, nursing, dentistry, and pharmacy,” explains Thomas, who was named the 2019 Communicator of the Year by the Mid-Atlanta Black Public Relations Society. “There are not many schools that have all of these programs and own and operate a hospital where their students can train. Howard sends more African American students to medical school than any other college and university. Each year, between ten to thirteen percent of the incoming class are graduates of other HBCUs. We also accept students into our medical school that may not have had other offers, and yet, our graduates place into residency programs just as well as students from other universities.”
The Office of University Communications is divided into different beats and assigned to different schools and colleges. Each team member meets with professors who are doing research or writing books, or notable students coming up through the ranks of a program to find stories to write and pitch to the media.
“Some of the most interesting projects that I’ve had the opportunity to work have been where we’ve tried to protect the legacy of the university, and particularly the College of Medicine,” says Thomas. “There is a new hospital that will be built in the East End section of Washington, D.C., and we wanted to ensure that it wouldn’t negatively impact the number of patients that were coming to Howard University Hospital. We also wanted to make sure that our students and doctors would have access to practice medicine and teach and train the students at that new facility.
“We’re one of four HBCUs in the country that have a College of Medicine,” Thomas continues. “The concern was that if this new hospital came and we weren’t allowed to be engaged and involved in the process, it might reduce the number of people coming to our hospital, which would then reduce the amount of work experience and opportunities that these students would have in the hospital.”
To build public awareness of this issue, Thomas and her team launched a campaign to show how the bill introduced to build the hospital in the community did not include an academic affiliation for Howard. “We were able to get a letter-writing campaign started and we engaged our alumni, faculty, and students on social media to put pressure on the Washington, D.C., leadership to make sure that Howard was included in that bill. Within two weeks, we were able to get one of the council members to propose an amendment to add Howard University into the language. As a result, we did come to terms with the city to ensure that Howard University and our hospital would be protected. In April 2020, the city announced a $225 million tax abatement program to help build a new hospital on Howard’s campus.”
This month, PR Week presented the Office of University Communications with the 2020 PRWeek Award for Best in a Crisis for their brilliant #HowardMedicineMatters communications campaign on behalf of the School of Medicine and Howard University Hospital.
Like many other universities across the country, Howard has its share of crises, but few have made national headlines. “In April 2018, student protesters took over the administration building in response to their financial aid concerns, which ultimately went viral and drew national media attention,” Thomas says. “We’ve addressed the students’ concerns through several campus listening and healing events, and as a result, we have a stronger working relationship between our student body and the administration.”
Earlier this month, when Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden announced that Howard University alumna Kamala Harris was his Vice Presidential pick, the Office of University Communications was inundated with national and international media requests.
“The announcement of Senator Kamala Harris was an amazing moment for Howard University,” says Thomas. “As a communications team, we did our due diligence to be prepared. The team researched any photos of her we might have had on file. Our television station shared links to speaking engagements she participated in on campus. We prepared a statement to post on social media in case she would be chosen. When it was announced that she was the candidate, it felt incredible! We were extremely busy responding to media requests for President Frederick. The media wanted to know how it felt that a Howard alumna is now the first Black woman to achieve this accomplishment. As a Black woman myself, it was an honor to play a small part in telling the story of what significant milestones a graduate with an HBCU degree can achieve.”
The Office of University Communications is also responsible for the university’s annual strategic planning around the homecoming. Last year, the communications department developed Howard Forward, a strategic plan that outlined the goals and objectives to improve and enhance the university over the next five years.
There were a few events planned throughout homecoming week to educate as well as entertain students including The State of the University Address with Dr. Frederick, where he talked about the strategic plan. In October 2019, the school announced its new program, Howard Entertainment, a partnership with Amazon. It’s the first of its kind, where African American students learn about the entertainment industry and, hopefully, build a network to go into careers after graduation. In January 2020, twelve students traveled to the Amazon headquarters in Los Angeles to train with Amazon Studio executives.
In late May, the Public Relations Society of America presented Howard University Office of University Communications with its first 2020 Bronze Anvil Award in the Twitter Engagement Category for its Howard University Homecoming 2019: Howard Forward campaign.
“I enjoy working in higher education because it allows me to use the skills I’ve learned in the entertainment industry but in an arena where the stakes are much higher,” says Thomas, who was named one of the ‘Top 25 African American PR Millennials to Watch’ in Huff Post in 2017. “The stories my team writes and places with global media outlets will have an impact on how someone views this prestigious institution of higher education. How I position Howard University in the public makes a difference in what students know about our academic programs as they decide where to attend school, it provides the alumni with bragging rights and further solidifies why their financial contributions are meaningful, and it influences other external stakeholders who may not have an immediate need to interact with Howard University, but whenever the moment does happen, I want a positive memory to come to mind.”
It All Started in Miami
Born in Miami, Thomas was raised in a middle-class family in the West Little River neighborhood. She is the eldest and only daughter to her parents, Selena and Alfred Thomas, who were teachers in Miami-Dade County. Thomas said having teachers for parents meant that she was a disciplined and well-mannered child.
An overachiever, Thomas attended arts magnet programs for advance and gifted students in elementary and middle school. Thomas attended the New World School of the Arts, one of the most prestigious high schools in downtown Miami, where she studied musical theater.
After high school, Thomas was on the fence about whether to pursue the arts full-time because she knew the competitiveness of the performing arts world. Thomas enrolled in college at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, also known as Florida A&M University or FAMU. She started as a broadcast journalism major with a minor in theater. She managed to audition for performing groups and companies; and was a part of FAMU Connection, the university’s performing group that helped recruit students to go to college.
With the FAMU Connection, she traveled to different parts of the state, and sometimes out of state to perform at recruitment fairs hosted by the university. But after her freshman year, Thomas decided to change her major and pursue public relations as a career and later received her bachelor’s degree. She continued with the FAMU Connection until her senior year to satisfy that itch she had as a stage performer.
After Thomas switched her major, she devoted significant time learning about the field of public relations. Before graduation, she completed a few internships, including one in the Office of Public Relations at FAMU. It was that internship that helped her understand that she could pursue PR in higher education.
Like most college graduates, Thomas did not immediately have a job lined up after graduation. She returned to Miami because she was expecting a job at Jackson Memorial Hospital, where she once interned, but the human resources process was taking more time than she was willing to wait.
As fate would have it, her former boss at FAMU, Sharon Saunders, was offered another position at North Carolina Central University, a historically black college and university. Saunders moved to Durham and offered Thomas a position as a Communications Specialist, where she stayed for nearly three years.
Thomas said her first job was a great experience. “We were a small team, Ms. Saunders was building a PR department from scratch,” she explains. “I wrote every press release that came out of the school for those two and a half years. Ms. Saunders had a lot of trust in me. She would always say that I am an anomaly and that I was the only young person that she knew that was dependable. She gave me leadership experience and opportunities that people my age just didn’t have. She also allowed me to make decisions whenever it was needed. Ms. Saunders didn’t mind taking a chance on me. She had me attend meetings on her behalf and report back to her because she didn’t always have time to go.”
Thomas recalled the time when MTV came to the campus to cover some of the students for a television show that they were putting together. Even though she was fresh out of college, Ms. Saunders said to the television crew, “Alonda is going to spend the day with you to make sure she knows everything that the crew is shooting.”
Thomas has been on the career fast track ever since and was willing to relocate. After North Carolina Central University, she decided to go to graduate school full time at Florida State University, a predominately white institution. After grad school, she moved to Atlanta to work with Edelman as an account executive in the business division. Two years later and without a job, Thomas quit and moved across the country to Los Angeles.
She landed at CAA (Creative Artists Agency), where she worked as a coordinator in the Speaker’s Bureau department. A year later, one of her mentors, Tiffany Smith-Anoa’i, a Howard University alumna, helped to secure a position as a publicity coordinator with Sander/Moses Productions, the company that produced the CBS Network series “Ghost Whisperer.” She stayed at Sander/Moses a short while after the program was canceled.
Thomas then went to work with another one of her mentors, Tosha Whitten-Griggs, whom she had met during her internship at Florida State University. Whitten-Griggs hired Thomas as a freelancer to work on a variety of PR projects at her newly-formed company, The Front Page Firm, where she handled a range of clients, including Bishop T.D. Jakes’ film projects Sparkle and Jumping the Broom; OWN’s “Welcome to Sweetie Pie’s”; news anchor Roland S. Martin; and entertainment reporter Kevin Frazier.
In 2013 after seven years in California, Thomas got a call from her mentor, Saunders, offering her an executive position as the Director of Media Relations at her alma mater, FAMU. Thomas moved back to Tallahassee, Florida. Six months later, Saunders retired, but she asked the then-interim president and now president of FAMU, Larry Robinson, to make Thomas the Special Assistant to the President for Communications after her departure. He did, but only until a permanent president was appointed. During her tenure at FAMU, she managed the department’s $1 million budget and led the Office of Communications through the university’s reaccreditation process; the presidential search and hiring of FAMU’s 11th president; and the development of advertising and marketing strategies. Then the new president came in and made several staff changes. After 18 months on the job, Thomas was let go and was out of work for a year.
During that year, Thomas worked a few freelance projects under her firm, Alonda Thomas Public Relations. But it wasn’t long before she received another job offer to move to Atlanta to work as a publicity consultant with Liquid Soul, a sport and entertainment marketing company. Through Liquid Soul and her firm, she handled television and film projects including CNN’s “United Shades of America,” Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, Disney’s Queen of Katwe, and ABC’s “black-ish.”
During that year, Thomas had stacked her resume with numerous entertainment projects. While still in Atlanta, she received a call from Whitten-Griggs, who asked Thomas to join her as the PR Manager at TV One’s headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland. Her assigned projects included the popular docuseries “Unsung,” and television movies Bobbi Kristina, When Love Kills: The Falicia Blakely Story, Downsized, You Can’t Fight Christmas, Miss Me This Christmas and TV One’s Rickey Smiley for Real Show.
Throughout Thomas’ career, she has been back and forth between entertainment and higher education, and she has been passionate and successful at both. “Entertainment is high energy and a fast-paced environment,” she says. “I had the opportunity to work with some interesting people. I positioned my clients to be featured in magazines and on television, but ultimately those projects come and go, and the next project begins and you start the cycle all over again. With higher education, I get the opportunity to build on past successes and watch a professor who has never interviewed with the press become highly sought-after for interviews. I get to tell stories about the student athlete who was willing to miss the MEAC Volleyball championship playoffs to give the gift of life to a stranger in need through a blood stem cell donation. The personal joy I feel when I read that professor’s comments in The Wall Street Journal or when I watch the student athlete be featured on ‘World News Tonight’ is an extremely gratifying feeling of doing good for others.”
Gwendolyn Quinn is an award-winning communications strategist and consultant with a career spanning more than 25 years. She is the Chief Content Officer of the Global Communicator. As a contributor, she has penned stories for NBCNews.com, Black Enterprise, Essence.com, Huff Post, and EURWEB.com.
