Promoting an event

Hi everyone, this is my second official blog. I'm doing my internship at The Nationals WA and so far it's going well.

Lately, I've been working a lot on an event called The Annual Nationals WA Conference and Convention. It's being held in Albany later this month and is a big event on The Nats calender. Most of their state executives are coming, along with many members, corporates and sponsors.

My job has been to help promote and organise the event. I started out writing emails to The Nats contact list telling them about the event. I was then in charge of registrations, where I sent them confirmation emails and reminder emails to people who hadn't responded. Next up, I helped put together information packs to send to the people who had registered. For this, I had to contact a tourism centre in Albany to order maps. Unfortunately they had none in stock, so we had to wait two weeks until they got more. After that, I put together the documents for the information packs and sent them off. I'm also double-checking each functions numbers.

What I found interesting was how The Nats focus more on promoting their events to their members and corporations. The media doesn't play as bigger role in their PR plans. The conference had some coverage by the ABC:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/12/18/2775974.htm?site=southcoast

Apart from community papers, this was the extent of media coverage the conference has got. For The Nats, this isn't an issue as their target audience isn't the general public, it is instead its members, corporates and sponsors.

I've got ten days left of my internship and am looking forward to seeing how the conference goes next weekend!