MYO Lunches

As some of you may already know, I had a bit of difficulty getting my posts for the blog working. But now I am continuing to let you know about my placement experience at Diabetes WA.

As the days went on, I was delegated different tasks to do each day. It came closer and closer to National Diabetes Week and we had to do more things. One of the things DWA had done in previous years for the annual week was distributing healthy lunches from companies to the media. They have promoted healthy eating during NDW and hoped to get an announcement on television or radio in return from delivering these healthy lunches.

This year, it was the same thing. DWA got catered healthy lunches from 'Make Your Own' which is a franchise in Perth with healthy foods and you can make your own lunch.

First, I was asked to map out the locations of the media outlets in Perth CBD and other areas as we had to deliver the lunches ourselves. I thought the easiest way to do this was using Google Maps, however I feel I might have been wrong. Sometimes for simple tasks from point A to point B you can do that. But I was using various locations and the mapping did not turn out right. As you may know, some streets in the city and Subiaco are one way streets and this ended up wrong in the mapping process. In this case, luckily we knew some of the media locations by memory, otherwise it would have been a big failure and a lot of time loss.

This shows that I should have prepared the exact route and prepared myself to know each direction beforehand. This is where public relations organisation and planning skills are very important as they help in the process of time management. Time management is important in PR as we need to get things done quickly in order to do other work as well. Also " time is money" as PR professionals are sometimes paid on an hour base rates and this shows time and planning is vital.

We also did a mail out for the MYO lunches with media releases, letters and promotional material for NDW and when we hand out the lunches on the day to the media.

My favourite part was delivering the lunches because at some radio stations the radio presenter or producer would come out and speak to us. This was a great way in getting to know who you are giving the lunches to and it gave us time to explain more about what DWA does and what we were doing during the week. It helped us to get more information to them and to promote DWA in the meantime.

In the end, we ended up getting an interview with Curtin 100.1 FM and Sonshine FM who were so grateful for their lunches and decided to help promote the week for us. They both interviewed Sandy Havlin, who is a DWA educator. It was a great outcome for us.

We could have been happier with more radio or television stations promoting NDW however sometime things don't go as planned and we have to hope for the best each time.

I will keep you posted on my experiences!