It's all about building relationships!

Hi Everyone, 

For this blog entry I’m going to talk about my experience with PPR and their community engagement strategies for their clients.

Cedar Woods is developing an aged housing establishment in Carine and as part of a community engagement technique needed myself and an admin assistant to go around the surrounding suburbs issuing letter to the community to let them know what is being planned.

Now in my final semester at uni, I’m taking the unit PR Consultancy which has a higher emphasis on community engagement and different practices that different stakeholders receive based primarily on their involvement within the community.  Basically the more the project is to affect the stakeholder, the higher level of engagement which decides which practice principle to apply. 

In this case, the surrounding community isn’t going to be affected by the again center development besides the occasional construction maybe slowing down the flow of traffic. Therefore the best practice principle was to issue letters to the surrounding community.

This experience was really good because it allowed me to get involved with practicing community engagement which is important in any project!!!

Till next time,

Emily

Out of the office - photo shoot

As I’m finding out, my job as an intern is more diverse and very different to what I originally expected. Bauxite Alumina Joint Venture (BAJV), has been very good to me in offering a wide range of activities and jobs you will have to undertake in a public relations field in a small organisation. 

Recently I got to join my supervisor, a photographer and a small team of field workers, set off for Bindoon and Toodyay to take photos of exploration and rehabilitation work.  Unlike my other work throughout this work placement, learning and experiencing what to do with a photo-shoot is nothing that we’ve learnt through the public relations course. I discovered it took a lot of planning and preparation to oraganise occasions like this and you had to be very organized and decisive about what was going to occur. Chantelle, my supervisor knew exactly what she wanted and had drawings and past examples of how it should be situated. Although a busy day, I did find this a great experience, as it was something new and different.  

It was a whole new side to PR and managing the public relations and marketing sector in a small organisation, it was nothing like we have gone through in the course content, as dealing with media but not in depth to dealing with photographers was really covered I found, at least not like what I experienced.  It was really interesting to see how things like that worked out, it was a lot of work by both parties for the photos to end up in advertising materials and on their websites.  

I think this was a great opportunity for me, as we haven’t and don’t do anything like it in the course at uni. It will give me a step up and past experience if and when I have to organise something like this again