The LSU SIFE team's "American GI" project won a Polaris Award at the annual awards banquet of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), California Inland Empire Chapter, April 11 in Redlands.

The American GI project was a publicity campaign designed to raise awareness of the American GI as one of TIME Magazine's Persons of the Century and to motivate people to go to the TIME 100 web site and vote for the American GI as their choice for the Person of the Century. The project ran from Thanksgiving 1999 through January 2000.

SIFE students created the AmericanGI.com website, then launched an email campaign targeted at American military organizations and supporters as their primary tactic to create awareness and provide a direct link to the AmericanGI.com site through which visitors could cast their vote. SIFE's AmericanGI.com web site received more than 50,000 hits during the six-week period, raising the American GI's standing on the TIME web site from below the top twenty, with fewer than 13,500 votes, to its final standing of number 12 in TIME's list, with more than 61,000 votes - an increase of more than 350 percent. By comparison, the average growth of other top twenty entries during that same period was between two and four percent. In addition, the guestbook on the AmericanGI.com web site received more than 540 entries (at last count), showing resounding support for the project.

While the polling closed in January of 2000, you can still view the standings. Visit the AmericanGI.com website at http://www.americangi.com and select "vote now" to get to the TIME site (but first, take a moment to peruse the rest of the site and read a few entries in the "guestbook"). The project was sponsored by a grant from Pacific Bell.