Four years of a degree tend to be underwritten by a small number of very specific products: the energy drink, the noodles, the pen, the laptop sticker. Nobody at those companies knows they were part of it. A short, specific letter about that is a genuinely nice thing to receive at a desk.
Snack, energy drink and stationery brands respond most readily to student stories — they are cheap to act on and the affection is real. Tech brands rarely send product but often reply. Anything requiring shipping to a dorm before a date is the hardest ask.
Send four to six weeks before the ceremony. Graduation is seasonal, so PR teams are handling a wave of these in April and May — being early in that wave matters more than for any other milestone.
Specificity is the whole thing. A PR inbox receives a lot of “I love your brand, can I have something”. It receives almost nothing like this:
Some do, and it is never guaranteed. What arrives is usually smaller and more personal than people expect — a note, a voucher, a sample box rather than a sponsorship. Snack, energy drink and stationery brands respond most readily to student stories — they are cheap to act on and the affection is real. Tech brands rarely send product but often reply. Anything requiring shipping to a dorm before a date is the hardest ask.
Send four to six weeks before the ceremony. Graduation is seasonal, so PR teams are handling a wave of these in April and May — being early in that wave matters more than for any other milestone.
Lead with the specific memory — where you were, what year, who you were with. Name the graduation and its date. Then stop. Do not ask for anything. The letters that get answered are the ones that clearly were not written to get something, and PR teams can tell the difference instantly.
Asking outright usually is, and it is also the least effective approach. Telling a brand what it has meant to you is not a request — it is the kind of message people forward around an office. Anything that comes back comes back because someone wanted to send it.
Tell us the memory in your own words. We write it into a letter the brand's team will actually read, deliver it to a verified contact, and route any reply straight back to your inbox.
Write my letter