PR Outside the PR Department

Hi All! My name’s Marie-Claire and I am completing my prac at the City of Joondalup. I’ve been placed with the Recreation Services team working with the sport and recreation clubs in the City. I’m now a little over halfway through my placement and finally feel I have something substantial to contribute to the blog.

I have found my first 10 days with the City incredibly interesting. I have completed a number of other placements over the last two years but have always been in a PR-focused department. In Recreation Services I am involved with the Club Development Program, Clubs in-focus, and the timing of my placement could not have been better because the team was about to undertake an 18 month review of the Program to see how they could improve communication with clubs and promotion of Clubs in-focus.

The team have been very excited to have someone with a PR background join them and I’ve been asked to review more or less all the material they produce. I evaluated the Joondalup Sports Achievement Grant Package and recommended changes to the promotion of the grant, language used in the application forms and assisted in planning the 2010 recognition ceremony. Interest in this grant has decreased recently and the team asked me to develop strategies to target possible applicants and increase uptake of the grant. I also reviewed the 2008/09 Sports Development Program Application Package for redistribution in 2009/10. This involved proofreading for spelling, grammatical and typographical errors and recommending changes to structure and language to improve the clarity of the eligibility guidelines.

Another project I have worked on was identifying tactics to attract clubs to volunteer at the 2010 Joondalup Festival. This involved a lot of research into why people of different generations volunteer, what they want out of the experience and their attitudes towards volunteering. It was left to me to come up with and decide the key messages, how best to communicate messages to different groups and how best to target them. I drafted carefully crafted text (based on my research) for a flyer, choose a background image and within a week the flyer was printed and ready for distribution.

I’ve also worked on some “not so exciting” task – phoning approx. 50 people who recently married in one of the City’s parks and beaches asking them to send me their wedding photos because we are putting together a wedding brochure and wanted to save money by not hiring a photographer!

I have enjoyed looking at an existing Program and department (unrelated to PR) and looking for ways to improve their PR function. It’s made me more aware of how the skills and theories we are learning apply to all areas of business as all areas have stakeholders with whom favourable relations must be maintain.