Hello fellow Interns,
A few weeks have gone by since my original post, so I thought it was time again for new one. I am now more than half way through my internship with St John of God Hospital, Murdoch.I have had many challenges and assisted the marketing and pr team with many of their internal communications operating objectives.
One of my most challenging tasks was to source new sponsors for the employee Gala Ball and revamp the current sponsorship proposal. This task involved creative thinking and brain storming; I had to come up a new list of small business that could be affected by the economic downturn and offer them free publicity and marketing by becoming involved in this prestige event. The Gala Ball is organised each year and is part of the employee celebrations.
I learnt a lot about sponsorship with this task, by bringing in theory regarding the types of sponsorship into practice. The sponsorship proposals were divided into two types: Corporate and marketing sponsorship. This event required sourcing Corporate sponsorship – organisations that could provide financial support. This type of sponsorship builds corporate reputation and provides an opportunity for the organisation involved to strengthen relationships with customers. St John of God Murdoch already had a database of these sponsors ranging from finance, banks, insurance and health clubs to name a few.
My task was to source new marketing sponsors in the form of donations for the silent auction. I firstly research on the internet for local business ranging from restaurants, beauty and spa salons, hotels, theatre and the opera. I then had to carry out a series of 20 cold calls to find out the contact name of the person in charge of sponsorship or public relations for all these organisations. The first few calls were a challenge. I learnt quickly that it was best to first mention the organisation I was calling from rather mention that I was working for pr and marketing as many people automatically thought that I was trying to sell them something and were not interested in talking to me. Once I had my promotional spiel sorted out, I was on a roll.
Anyway enough from me for now :)
1 comment:
Through my internship I’ve also become familiar with cold calling, placing phone calls to local businesses to see if they would be interested in partaking in a new campaign Make-A-Wish Australia was bringing out. At first I also found it challenging. Being well prepared is a key so you can answer any ‘on the spot’ questions. We also had a spiel in front of us which we adapted to each phone call depending on the initial response and made a conscious effort to ensure we sounded up beat and genuinely enthusiastic (not as though we were reading off a piece of paper). It was disheartening getting turned down a number of times, however we persisted and successfully gained a fair amount of involvement from the community.
Goodluck with gaining sponsorship!
Post a Comment