The attempt to create relationships

Creating relationships with those in the community is essential especially for a non-for-profit organisation. Communicare is holding National Families Week from May 13th- 21st this year. National Families Week, is about helping children understand how important family is and how working together as a family will allow them to live a healthier lifestyle. 

Not many people in the community seem to know about National Family Week, so this week my task was to ring up different IGAs to see if they wanted to partner with us to get the word out there about the event. Communicare was going to provide everything like colouring and drawing competitions as well as posters for promotions (because for a non-for-profit, any free type promotion is positive), all that was needed was the space to place the items. 

In my several years as a PR students and doing work placements, ringing organisations is now something that seems to get simpler, if you follow the steps which is introduce yourself, the organisation and explain why you are ringing. I followed this procedure when calling the first IGA and success, they agreed to lend us their space to promote National Families Week, Upon that everything seemed downhill, everyone had a different reason such as, they did not have any space, they do not work with local communities, their managers were overseas etc and couldn't help. As time went on, and the ringing continued, I had another three IGAs agree to helping Communicare out with National Families Week. 

Ringing up the different IGAs, most of the managers and supervisors I spoke too, were nice and easy and speak too, whilst some were intimidating, which meant I had to change my approach on how I explained why I was ringing. 

Though at times intimidating, it was a challenge and none the less it was research for Communicare and the marketing and media team, as we found out why the different IGAs could not help us along with the ones that could. 

Till next time :)