While my official 20-day placement with the Fellowship of Australian Writers (WA) will soon come to an end, there is still one more major task which I'm helping to implement.
The Fellowship is busily preparing for the opening of Mattie Furphy House - a retreat for visiting guest writers where workshops and classes are held. The opening is set down for October 17 and represents one of the most significant events in the Fellowship's long history.
Among the distinguished guests attending are Heritage and Local
Government Minister John Castrilli, Minister for Culture and Arts John Day, Governor
General Malcolm McCusker, as well as numerous dignitaries from the Department
of Culture and Arts, local government representatives, university professors
and other industry professionals.
The timing of the Mattie Furphy opening provides an opportunity for me to practice event planning skills which I otherwise would not have had the opportunity to complete. So far I've been responsible for creating an electronic invitation, helping to organise catering and drafting a media release.
Due to the number of high-profile dignitaries who will be attending, FAWWA identified an opportunity for media coverage. This is an area the organisation is largely unfamiliar with.
Next week I will send out a media release to the West Australian Newspaper, Sunday Times, Western Suburbs Weekly and Claremont Post in the hope of securing a photographer for the opening. It is our aim to have photos of the opening published within the newspapers' social pages.
All things going smoothly, I'm pretty confident that this will happen because of the number of high-profile people who will be attending. This should make the event attractive to the newspapers.
Thanks for reading.
Dean Stacey
1 comment:
Wow! What an amazing opportunity for you and your organisation! You will definitely be able to drum up some media coverage for this event, just be sure to follow up with the media outlets you will be distributing these to. Hopefully they will contact you back for further information, but even if they don't be sure to check the papers in the coming weeks just in case - I learnt this with a couple of media releases I have sent out - many times they won't contact you at all, and just publish an article so it is important to check so you can record this for evidence of your evaluation.
I hope you have had some experience in actually organising the event, it is a great experience and you really learn the value of events for leveraging the organisations key public relations efforts.
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