A communications plan to finish it up

Greetings.

Finally, I am able to post my final blog post after having been cut off from the internet for the past five days. 

The 3rd October 2011 was my last day at Shell Malaysia Exploration and Production (SMEP) and I wanted to update you on the last two weeks of my internship. Even though my placement was stretched over seven weeks due to a number of public holidays, I realized how little time 20 days really are to get to know a job and do anything meaningful. I bet most of you came to the same conclusions.

Back to my activities of the last two weeks at SMEP, during which I remained in the internal relations department. The posters I designed for the ‘Our Business Our Future’ staff engagement project have finally been put up on a stand in the lobby for everyone to see. They turned out really well and I feel proud of my accomplishment every time I pass by.

Aside from designing a poster for the Games 2011 internal sports carnival and writing up a few short news articles for the PC Sign On, I spent the past two weeks working on a mini-communications plan to showcase one of Shell’s major CSR activities.

While celebrating Shell’s 100^th anniversary in Miri in August 2010, the company announced the establishment of a major charity grant and called on all its employees to submit proposals for community service projects to be funded and implemented within one year. The goal of the campaign was for Shell staff to volunteer and participate directly in realizing CSR activities throughout Malaysia. Overall the campaign was a huge success and 36 projects were chosen and carried out by September 2011.

In order to appreciate the volunteers and to highlight Shell’s commitment to CSR, we decided to create a series of articles for each successful project to be published on the internal PC Sign On news. I was put in charge of developing a simple communications plan to best leverage the stories for an internal audience. After discussion with my supervisor, we decided to start a weekly series featuring a number of articles on similar projects every Wednesday for the next two months.

The next week, I spent going through all the projects’ reports to get an idea of how to organize them in a meaningful way. I then ordered them into common themes, such as “Health & Safety Education”, “Sustainable Living” and “Renovations”. I also went through the PC Sign On archives to find any articles about the projects previously published to be recycled.

After my mini communications plan got approved, I turned once more to the countless reports in order to write short articles for each and every project. I was enlightening to read about all the diverse projects, developed and implemented by ordinary Shell staff in their free time. One of the larger projects aimed at establishing a sustainable waste management system to the remote Kelabit community of the Bario Highlands was carried out together with students from Curtin University.

Now, at the end of my internship, I have only managed to write down half of the articles to be published and will have to hand over the remaining work to my colleagues. I dislike leaving work unfinished and yet I am glad that I don’t have to write all of the stories myself. Still it drives home the fact that writing is the essence of public relations and the more practice one gets the better.

I guess most of you have been done with your internships for quite some time and I need to start catching up with my report. Hope you enjoyed your placements as much as I did. I will miss the routine as well as the challenges of working at Shell.

Martin Tengeler
14196744
Sarawak Campus