An overdue update!

Hello all!!

I've been so busy and haven't updated in a while...so this will be a long one- I'll try and keep in interesting.

I'm now in my second last week of my placement at the Gnarabar in Margaret River.... and it's all going really well.

My last post was in the lead up to the National Telstra Business Awards, in which Gnarabar was nominated for two National categories the MYOB Small Business Award and the Telstra Regional Business Award.

As I said, at the state finals for these awards, Gnarabar’s owner (Anthony) was not prepared for the win, and kind of bombed it on the speech. So in the lead up to the National final we did lots of media and interview training, and speech rehearsals. In the end, Anthony was as prepared as possible, which was great.

I also had the task on contacting and preparing all media, especially Perth, writing media releases, organizing images etc for the “best case scenario” of us winning.

In the end Gnarabar did not end up taking out the awards, although we really thought it was amazing to make it so far. In follow up we sent personal thank you/congratulation cards to all the finalists which we thought was important to acknowledge the success of everyone making it to the finals of such prestigious awards.

Back at the beginning of September Gnarabar also hosted a Fathers Day event in which famous Australian comedian “Austen Tayshus” performed his routine. In the lead up to this I was in charge of the promotion of the event through the website, facebook, and Gnarabars main channel- the local media. I organized an interview between the local paper and Austen Tayshus, accompanied by a media release and images, which was published in the local papers Entertainment section.

The next big PR task was the production day of a new sub brand of Gnarabar- Barefoot Beach Weddings (BBW). BBW is a wedding catering and venue business that caters to laid back, casual but classy weddings in the beautiful South West. To promote and launch the brand, we decided it would be great to make a short promotional film of a staged wedding. For this, we also incorporated all other kinds of wedding suppliers from throughout the South West. I was a part of contacting these suppliers to ask for their participation and pitch to them our idea…. to intern have them volunteer their time for a day to stage this wedding. In the end, we had a wedding stylist, photographer, videographer, florist, musician/D.J’s, makeup artist and hairdresser all on board which created the most beautiful wedding.

I was also in charge of recruiting a fictional family and wedding guests to dedicate their time and participate in the film, setting out action plans and run orders, set up, and general promotions of the initial filming to gain interest from the community. It ended up being a fantastically successful day, and everyone had a great time. I have posted a few images from the day on this blog, and hopefully when the video is finalized I will post that after the official brand launch before November.

Other than this, I have also been assisting in general PR duties.
Updating the website, writing locals letters, writing copy for advertising and writing media releases.

Next on our agenda is the organization and planning of a charity Melbourne Cup event. This blog is getting long, so I better save all the info on this amazing event for next week…

Stay tuned for my next update…you might even want to come to Margaret River for Melbourne Cup!!

Demi Wright
14261341

Bentley Campus