Hi all!! Hope you are all doing well!!
My second week at IBL went on smoothly. I here started to really appreciate my internship as I was more concerned with different subject matters such as sponsorship. IBL being one of the major companies of Mauritius, many of the small enterprises, schools or even the non-for-profit organisations of the country seek for the financial help of IBL to be able to undertake projects. As you may all guest, the company cannot, of course, accept all sponsorship demands from these organisations.
So during my second week, I was asked to reply to all of the sponsorships requests. I have to say that I really liked this job. What is interesting and sometimes hard is that some of the demands are really for a good cause, some touched old persons, others handicapped ones but as my Manager told me, when you are in a position of managing a company where you decide what to do and not, you have to know your goals. Some of the sponsorships demands were really difficult to say No to but it is a must that you know what you want your company to achieve. "You can't just give money to all causes" she told me. IBL being focused on children causes this year, we had to say NO to many other causes.
That was a nice lesson for me. Sometimes you have to put your feelings aside...
My second week at IBL went on smoothly. I here started to really appreciate my internship as I was more concerned with different subject matters such as sponsorship. IBL being one of the major companies of Mauritius, many of the small enterprises, schools or even the non-for-profit organisations of the country seek for the financial help of IBL to be able to undertake projects. As you may all guest, the company cannot, of course, accept all sponsorship demands from these organisations.
So during my second week, I was asked to reply to all of the sponsorships requests. I have to say that I really liked this job. What is interesting and sometimes hard is that some of the demands are really for a good cause, some touched old persons, others handicapped ones but as my Manager told me, when you are in a position of managing a company where you decide what to do and not, you have to know your goals. Some of the sponsorships demands were really difficult to say No to but it is a must that you know what you want your company to achieve. "You can't just give money to all causes" she told me. IBL being focused on children causes this year, we had to say NO to many other causes.
That was a nice lesson for me. Sometimes you have to put your feelings aside...
2 comments:
Hi Rachel,
Your post really touched me in two ways. Firstly, I am Mauritian too and studying in Perth. I always wondered whether everything I learnt in Australia could be relevant to Mauritius because of how small the country is and that many organisations do not really give much information about PR Officers in the newspapers.
So, what exactly does a PR Officer do at IBL? Have you sent any news releases? If so, what are the journalists' reactions? Publish the article as is or contact you?
Secondly, it is awesome that IBL gives so many sponsorships but I wanted to know whether you knew why it did? What are they getting in return? Are they publicising it? How are you telling the others no without them having harsh feelings against IBL?
If you have time to answer those questions it would be great else, just enjoy your time at IBL and have a nice placement.
Cheers, Emilie
Hi Emilie, thanks for your post.
So, actually at IBL your have the Communication department in which you have the PR works done. The communication department is there to convey key messages to its publics (internal and external). Also to make sure that the reputation of the company is on the top. Actually, unfortunately, I did not stay long enough to be able to send news releases to the press. However, I was in contact with most of them during the first two weeks on my internship and this is for the contacts updates that I had to do. And the thing is that, when I said I was from IBL calling for xxx purpose, I felt that they were careful about what I was saying and this I think is due to the fact that IBL and the local press are in regular contact.
Secondly, as I said in my post, IBL makes available an annual budget for the purpose of sponsorship. And this is done in the idea of firstly helping but also like any other company to obtain publicity in return. Actually, being a well-known company just like IBL, it is good to have a Corporate Social Responsibility strategy and you have to stick to that. There have been a lot of demands which was not within the policy of the new CSR of IBL, and we replied by explaining on what the company was focusing for the year 2009. We had to clearly explained WHY we were and this was done in a very diplomatic way. We put the accent on the fact that we had decided that we would be focusing on children who are in need financially and this included help for the education of these children, health support, providing materials for school, sponsoring sports events for them. When you say NO for a request of sponsorship and giving your reasons clearly stating why your answer is negative, creates comprehension on behalf of these people. Actually, no one had reply back saying that they did not understand our decision, by this I mean to say that, children's causes are sensible matters and people cannot be opposed to that.
I hope I have answer to your questions. I you have any more questions, please feel free to ask.
Cheers,
Rachel.
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