And who said not-for-profits were easy?

Hi everyone

Thought I'd get cracking with my first blog post since we're almost coming up to week 4!

Since the beginning of July I've started my work placement with the not-for-profit organisation Relationships Australia (WA). Relationships Australia is mainly interested in building up those human relationships and adding value to the person. They deal in counselling, mediation, professional development, educational courses, employee assistance programs and Aboriginal services. What I do is help out in their marketing/PR department with writing up articles, writing brochures and in the future hopefully starting up some social media.

Honestly even though we were heavily encouraged to always be on the lookout for work experience opportunities and try as much as we could I never bothered to apply for anything until this unit. This was bad for me because it made me so nervous on my first week of placement; I was quiet and hopefully not too unfriendly to the rest of my department.

Well one month later I've definitely improved and gained that confidence to try my best and not let my team down. Relationships Australia is a medium sized organisation and because of that they have their own marketing/PR department. It's more marketing than PR but I'm hoping it'll start evolving into a combination of the two.

Due to the fact that I hadn't completed any work experience before let alone in a not-for-profit sector I wasn’t sure entirely what to expect. I thought definitely that a not-for-profit would be “easier” and less stressful. I have nothing to compare my placement here too so I can’t really say if it is easier or not. There are deadlines that I have to meet and ways of writing that I have to adhere to each week. Due to the “family-ness” of the organisation the pieces that I write have to be wholesome and positive. I’m not sure if it can be compared to working for a corporate PR firm but I do have to say adjusting to new methods of writing is difficult.

Woohoo for the first blog post.

Hope to hear from you all

Angela