Cold Calling

I believe there are inherent interpersonal qualities that make up a sound pr practitioner.  In working at the Department for Communities a great deal of my work responsibilities involved communicating directly over the telephone. 

Cold calling is the process of approaching prospective customers or clients, typically via the telephone, who were not expecting such an interaction. The word "cold" is used because the person receiving the call is not expecting a call or has not specifically asked to be contacted.

I was assigned two relatively important tasks that included securing nominations for the WA Senior Awards and trying to secure nominations for 'One Sky, Many Paths', an Indigenous Youth Leadership Program.  

Regarding the senior awards nomination program, numerous days were spent adding numbers to a database that consisted of over 1600 senior community organisations.  It involved accessing the white pages, typing in the postcode and the address to find out the contact number and than copying the number into the database so the DfC had the information for next year. The same process was carried out for the Indigenous Youth leadership program.  This process in itself took up a considerable amount of time and was very monotonous. 

Following this, I than had to work on both programs at the same time, calling up a wide range of stakeholders from large organisations to Indigenous youth in remote communities, to seniors throughout the state of WA, trying to persuade people to nominate someone and subsequently fill out an application form and send it in.

This task was very repetitive, very long and required me to maintain my enthusiasm as well as trying to be as persuasive and polite as possible.  There were times where I would be speaking to someone from a remote Aboriginal community like Fitzroy crossing for example.  Trying to persuade a young Indigenous man about the skills and valuable experience the youth program would provide was relatively easy and he seemed very interested in getting one of his elder’s to nominate him for the program.  What I didn’t know straight away was that they did not have internet access and his community organisation did not have a fax machine. Whilst this presented a problem I was able to send the nomination kit to another Fitzroy organisation, where the young man was still able to retrieve the information.

At the end of these two tasks assigned to me, I had managed to gain a large number of application forms that were sent into the DfC for both programs.  Even though the time spent finding numbers and calling was not that enjoyable, I was able to improve upon my oral communication skills and my supervisor and other colleagues looked upon my progress very favorably.

If I could offer any advice it would be this: Always be willing to remain positive and proactive regardless of the task assigned to you in a pr environment.  If you are relatively shy or aren’t that confident talking to a diverse group of stakeholders, cold calling is a very effective way in improving upon these skills.