It has been a while since my first post and the Open Day activities are underway. I come in twice a week, and over the last few weeks I have been liaising with a variety of external suppliers to come the necessities for such a large scale event.
The vast majority of my position involves communicating with different suppliers, partners and colleagues. I have learnt to carefully construct formal emails and find this makes up a large part of my position here.
I also have been attending a lot of meetings, last week we met with David from Markets Under the Pines. These are markets that are every second sunday on the Edinburgh South Oval at Curtin, they are an external company that we have decided to incorporate into Open Day as they run on the same day. The meetings are a chance for a pitch, as we talk to David over coffee about the benefits of running the markets on this day and see where we can potentially use his suppliers for the day. The pitch is interesting and we manage to negotiate a plan which in the end will save us cost on extra food vans and entertainment.
Today I went over the quotes I had for first aid, water tanks and portaloos. I gained 3 quotes for each, then booked accordingly. The process is quick and easy after a variety of quotes have been looked at. I am learning there are so many parts to an event, each different piece is a small step towards completing the puzzle. An event such as Open Day is ran annually which meant that Curtin already has some solid relationships with external suppliers, this made my job easier as I spoke with Asha about what worked and what didn’t from last year and tried to improve on this with my bookings.
Last week I went along to a meeting with Asha which was all about post event reporting and analysing, this was interesting as I saw how beneficial this can be as assessing the success of an event.
I noticed how important employee communication is at Curtin the staff all help each other out, we get emails in the afternoons about workshops to do with change, group sport activities and more. You can see how the company benefits by having this in place - there is an excellent vibe and you feel like part of a team that understands the values of Curtin.
In PR Corporate I focused on Employee communication in times of strategic change, it was interesting to see that this was evident of Curtin. Curtin is going through a massive restructuring as they move forward toward the aim of “Greater Curtin” - there is change workshops, frequent meetings and the change is talked about openly and honestly between employees.
We have also been frequently editing the program for online/print release. The writers send it to Asha and I where we find errors in punctuation and spelling, each time so far we have found some errors - it’s amazing what a fresh pair of eyes can see. I have learnt that in Public Relations editing plays a vital role as how correct a document is can convey the professional or lack of professionalism for that company.
Here is a link to the must-see events for the day: http://openday.curtin.edu.au/must-see/
The next few weeks involve getting my hands dirty, as I will be sorting through signage and taking stock take. I look forward to checking in with you all closer to the date. Wish me luck!
