Let's make it personal

Over the past couple of weeks I have been tackling a lot of different projects including helping organise kids for photo shoots for the 2013 PMH Foundation calendar, interviewing and writing up stories of kids at PMH for the Ambassador program, visiting some in hospital dressed as the Stitches the Bear, writing and changing the monthly media report template and finding stories to pitch to journalists who wanted to write articles about the Foundation. Through all of these different activities I have been amazed at how versatile our team has had to be in adapting and accommodating key stakeholders. Each person has a completely different background, relationship to the hospital and the Foundation, interests and experiences. The Foundation does a lot of qualitative and quantitative research on its key publics through online campaigns, database information, commissioned reports and media monitoring to keep updated with changing social trends, issues and behaviours. I have noticed that the key concept used to successfully engage key stakeholders is to customise all messages and make things as personal as possible. Two recent tactics PMH Foundation is thinking of adopting to achieve this are email testing and a proposed online newsletter.

Email Tests

As discussed in my last blog, I have learnt a lot at weekly team meetings. We recently talked about testing donor responses to ‘thank you’ letters and welcome packs by sending one letter to half our database and a different one to the other half to see which one gets a better response. I was interested to learn how tests such as these help organisations better understand their key publics and tailor their messages and activities to suit their supporters needs and interests.

Online Newsletter Proposal

Another proposed activity was the idea of creating an electronic newsletter for our donors that could be tailored to suit individual interests. For example there are some donors who participate in certain events every year and are only interested in this, others are keen to give specifically to something like research and others who just like supporting PMH through buying merchandise. There would be significant benefits in creating a newsletter that could customise, and essentially personalise, information to suit certain stakeholders. The concept would be to make sure people are targeted individually and not made to accept a ‘one size fits all’ template. This way donors and supporters are not hassled by things they are not interested in and maximum awareness is stressed about things that do interest them. I have recently been involved with research into different online services that help to facilitate this sort of online newsletter, a service I never knew existed. I was introduced to http://mailchimp.com/, one such service that impressed me so much that I wrote up a recommendation and proposal for its use by the Foundation.

It has been fantastic to see how even up until my last days working at the Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation I have continued to learn so much about the many functions and activities associated with public relations. Although a lot of the activities I have been involved in often cross over into marketing activities, I still strongly believe that each one helps build relationships and communication channels with key stakeholders and thus falls under the PR banner. I have thoroughly enjoyed my time at the Foundation and it has helped me better prepare for a life outside of university both professionally and personally. I would like to personally thank all the staff at PMH Foundation for having me and investing time into giving me such an amazing and beneficial experience. Thanks also for offering me a paid position! PMH Foundation is an awesome place to work and I love the added benefit of knowing I am helping sick children and the WA community. At this point I am proudly going to say non-profit is the best PR sector :)