Promoting to Career-Driven Women

Hey all,

This is Stacey here. I’ve been doing my public relations internship at Fashionate. It’s a relatively small company that mainly runs corporate events, covering all marketing and public relations aspects for the upcoming events on behalf of their clients. They also run educational seminars and charity events.

I have just finished representing one of their clients; Sandi Givens. Sandi is an inspirational public speaker on women getting ahead in the workforce. Basically I was to handle the publicity for three educational seminars she was running while she was in Perth. I found it very nerve-racking at the start, as I was left in charge of ensuring the turnout of the seminars.

The budget for generating publicity was next to nothing. After creating a brief message strategy (taking notes from the message strategies I have done at Uni), my focus was career driven woman. We ran through ideas, and came up with the idea to run a free telecommunication seminar first. As Sandi Givens lives in Sydney, this would be a great opportunity to give an example of what she did. Sandi agreed to a one hour session; however I do believe it would have been better if we had done another session at a different time to reach more people.

The next step was to really grit down on publicity. With the resources and costs we had, our strongest tool was email. But it wasn’t totally necessary to target it to a broad audience. This was because the seminars were around $250 each (quite expensive for a half day seminar). Our two main places we went about releasing media releases; women’s network groups and company newsletters. We were a success with our media releases. Some of the larger companies actually had newsletters specifically for women who worked in the field, although it was a bit of an issue with the frequency of the newsletters being released every couple of months. A few of the media releases ended up on women’s network groups WebPages, including a small article on the Women’s Network Australia.

I also helped host ‘Chick Chat’, a luncheon for business women that Fashionate does in conjunction with the Rydges Hotel every two months. This was another opportunity for me to promote the Sandi Givens seminars. Even for just a luncheon it was quite stressful being behind the scenes, but it was a good learning experience, I had a good time and I also got to see someone be proposed too!

Overall the seminars turnout was a little bit less than we expected, considering the amount of people we reached. It was disappointing on my behalf, as this was my first task, however I can evaluate where I need to improve and use it for next time. There were things that were out of our control, such as the cost to attend each seminar which would have scared people off. However it was good to get an insight on how things worked. I didn’t realise how much time it would take calling up just trying to get in contact with the right people. But now I’ve got a feel for it, I feel more confident for the next task I’ll be given.

Stacey Cook, Bentley Campus, Curtin