Adapting to change

When I was first asked to come on board as an intern at RugbyWA, a large part of my role was producing the 'Cut Out Pass' EDM which is sent to over 22 thousand RugbyWA stakeholders. This is one of the most important forms of stakeholder communications at RugbyWA and I was given the opportunity to take it on board and make it my own.

Originally, I started producing Cut Out Pass using Mail Chimp, a service that allows you to mass produce and send EDM's and newsletters to large mailing lists. On my first day as an intern, I took over four hours to complete Cut Out Pass, as I was anxious about completing it with absolute precision and did not have a firm grasp of the Mail Chimp system. After producing around 10 Cut Out Pass editions through Mail Chimp, I managed to start producing the EDM with the same quality in under an hour. It allowed me to complete more tasks throughout the day, which I felt increased my value as an intern and allowed me to learn more, rather than taking over half my day to complete the newsletter.

However, in March of this year RugbyWA changed their EDM platform to 'Exact Target,' which is run through 'Sales Force' and gives much more advanced EDM analytics and allows you to learn much more about your audience. This was difficult for me, as I was beginning to know Mail Chimp back to front and inside out, and was all of a sudden told that the subscription was not being renewed and I would never be using it again.

This meant that I had to start again from square one with Exact Target, and being a more advanced program it was a difficult task. When first using Exact Target, it felt like my first day as an intern all over again. I sat there dumfounded for over four hours attempting to do a job I was used to doing quickly between the hours of 4pm and 5pm. It was a difficult change, but now 12 editions later I know the structure of Exact Target as well as I used to know Mail Chimp.

The lesson from this is that whilst I was at first hesitant and anxious about the change, all it did was challenge me and allow me to learn a new system and the back end of a program that is very beneficial in regards to stakeholder relations.

Luke.

Bring on the next chapter

This week my internship placement has come to an end and I can’t help but to feel sad but also excited as I prepare to enter the ‘real world’. Entering the real world has always seemed so far away, but now its here and to be honest I’m nervous. Very nervous in fact! Finishing university after four years is like the end of a new chapter but the start of a new one!

Being apart of this internship experience has been much more beneficial than I first anticipated. I was finally given the opportunity to put all my theoretical knowledge into practice. I feel so privileged that I had the opportunity to intern at such a wonderful organisation (Curtin), in a team that has been so friendly and supportive right the way through. The past three months has flown by and I feel so much more confident in my ability to successfully carry out public relations practices in a professional environment. I now have the confidence to pitch to journalists and clients, write captivating media releases and confidently organise a successful event. Some of the other tasks and activities I have been involved in during my time at Curtin include;

•        Media monitoring and media enquires
•         Social media management
•         Loud shirt day
•         John Curtin Medals
•          The Agency launch
•          The medical school celebration

Curtin has given me the opportunity to be apart of some amazing events and activities and I have loved every minute of it. Within the last three months I have learnt more than I thought were possible, and I’m so thankful for my opportunity. I went into my internship not knowing where I wanted to take my career, now I feel passionate about pursuing a career in events management.

Bring on 2016!

The final hurdle: A successful event

As an intern at Curtin University, I was fortunate enough to be apart of the annual John Curtin Medals Ceremony for 2015. Wow, was this an amazing experience! Each year the ceremony awards individuals for their outstanding contributions to the community within their chosen field. One of the 2015 recipients was Kaye Brand, the founder of Fibromyalgia Western Australia Inc.

After witnessing the event in its entirety, I could have never anticipated how special and emotionally charged the ceremony was going to be. It was nothing like I had ever experienced before. It was refreshing but also a huge learning curve for me as I plan my future in events management.

The preparation that went into the event was quite stressful and daunting, but after seeing it all come together it was definitely worth it. For the event I was involved in the formation of the slide show, the order of proceedings and the briefing documentation. From this process, I have learnt you can never be too organised or too prepared because in events management something can go wrong in the blink of an eye.

What surprised me the most about this event, was not the set up, the perfect flower arrangement or the catering selection. In fact, it was the minor details that made the event for me. As students we are often too caught up in having the perfect order of proceedings that we forget about the ‘nitty gritty’ elements that make an event so special and memorable for those involved. Personally it was the celebration of cultural diversity and aboriginal history that made the ceremony so memorable for me.

As apart of the formal proceedings the events department incorporated a ‘Welcome to Country’. The ‘Welcome to Country’, usually preformed by Simon Forrest, is an aboriginal blessing that acknowledges the traditional owners of the land in which Curtin Bentley is sited. Not sure what I mean? Check out the link below.

http://about.curtin.edu.au/welcome/traditional-aboriginal-welcome/

I have never seen this in an event before, but it was definitely an eye opener and added a nice touch to the formalities. I’m very thankful that I got to work on such an amazing and unique event. I will take a lot away from this experience as I begin my career in events management. I hope everyone else is enjoying their internship placements as much as me!

Looking The Part

As I continue my internship, the importance of dressing professionally becomes more evident. Whether your meeting clients, the media, other colleagues or holding an event looking the part is half the battle. If you want to be taken seriously you need to dress appropriately.  The way you dress and present yourself will determine how others perceive you and will certainly influence ones first impression. Dressing appropriately for the organisation also instills confidence in the client and illustrates that you take pride in your job position and the organisation in which you work for. There is nothing worse than meeting someone who is dressed inappropriately, has poor hygiene and personal grooming. It doesn’t look good particularly for someone representing a brand or an organisation.

Through my experience I have noticed that Curtin University’s employees, take pride in how they present themselves. In particular their attire is noticeably different when they conduct an event or client briefings. Black or white corporate attire is considered appropriate in the events and media department at Curtin. As a representative of the Curtin brand I was also expected to follow this dress code, and I did! Dressing professionally was not just a requirement, it helped me feel more confident and competent in my role as I attained more respect from employees and clients. It also helped me to feel like I was apart of the team and not just the ‘intern’.

Over the course of my placement I became more accustom to what is and isn’t appropriate dress wear within the workplace. As a swimming teacher currently, I now feel more comfortable in dressing for the workplace or for a future job interview. Although each organisation polices different dress standards, I have learnt its better to dress up than down and to avoid the following;

• Thongs, spaghetti straps, boardies, hats
• See through clothing showing undergarments
• Clothing that is too short or revealing
• Ill fitting clothes that is to small or too big

Has anyone had a different experience with workplace dress codes? What is your take on appropriate work attire? Share your thoughts?

A Different Kind of PR.

Hello there guys!

My name is Jonathan Philip and I would like to say that during my internship i'm having a blast with all the adventures and experience that i'm currently going through. I am currently having my internship at a palm oil company which is known as the Malaysian Palm Oil Board. 

A little background about the company, Malaysian Palm Oil Board or MPOB for short is the premier government agency entrusted to serve the country’s oil palm industry. It's main role is to promote and develop national objectives, policies and priorities for the wellbeing of the Malaysian oil palm industry. 

When i first arrived at the office, i felt nervous meeting all my colleagues but they welcomed me with open arms. My colleagues then showed me some of the work they did and thought me what to do and by the end of the day i got used to the work and it was good. I was then given some paperwork on sorting out the licenses of small stakeholders and we went to meet them and explain the solution to the issues that they are facing. I was surprised there were no Media Release kind of documents here but the PR i'm doing is involving more to the community relations. 

TPFF 15

It doesn’t get much bigger than this event for the fashion industry in Perth. The Telstra Perth Fashion Festival 2015 (TPFF) was one of the many highlights I experienced through my internship.

Having never participated in TPFF before or worked with a designer, I was extremely intimidated leading up to the event, but eager to learn as much as I could.

While my role with Steph Audino for TPFF 2015 wasn’t revolved around Public Relations (although leading up to the event there was media liaising in regards to photo shoots and news articles), it was to help Steph in anyway I could and learn as much about the fashion industry as I could to see if it is an industry I wanted to be apart of.

The lead up to the night was all about organising the event as best we could.

As a team we:

• ·      Went to model castings
• ·      Decided the line up for the outfits
• ·      Went to model fittings
• ·      Finalised shoes, steaming etc.
• ·      Dressed the models for dress rehearsal 

On the night of the show I was apart of the back of house (BOH) team for the Steph Audino show on closing night. And BOH was chaotic, stinking hot and confined, yet it was exhilarating, fast paced and so much fun.

Words cannot describe the atmosphere backstage, it was electrifying and adrenaline pumping. Dressing models is by far an extremely stressful job; trying to zip, button, add belts, lace up shoes and make sure everything is 110% correct before they step foot on the runway.

Although no matter how stressful, it was an amazing experience and a success that I wouldn’t have been able to be apart of if I hadn’t undertaken this internship at Steph Audino. I couldn’t be more grateful or lucky to be apart of it. 

This event definitely re-ignited my feelings towards wanting to be apart of the fashion industry through public relations.

*note; photos of the runway can be found on the Steph Audino Instagram page: @stephaudinolabel 

Did you feel that your internship help you decide whether or not you wanted to pursue a role in the public relations industry? Why/why not?

I Saw You in the Newspaper!

Good old traditional media!

Yesterday we were contacted by a man called William, to inform us that he had been observing the progress of the After School Project over the local newspapers and he wanted us to take the children of his longhouse (RumahAmpik) into our program!

The After School Project is an educational program where we ‘foster’ groups of children from the community and carry out various educational activities with them, to teach them that learning can be a fun and rewarding experience. We currently have three groups of children under our charge, which are the Kompleks Hamidah Yakub orphanage, Rumah Anak Amal Kesayangan Kami orphanage and the children of the nearby community in Kampung Wireless.

We were invited today Mr. William’s longhouse to meet with the village chief and his assistant and during our meeting they told us of the high dropout rate of their village, as well as the high marriage rate, especially of those under 18-years-old. These marriages were usually due to unplanned teen pregnancy and are legal in Malaysia, as the parents of the under-aged individuals gave their consent. Something Mr. William said really shocked me and made me realise that the After School Project and the education it brings really is important.

“Parents protect our children, saying ‘don’t scare them, let them be!’ but when they get older, they get wilder. They say ‘help them, but don’t scare them, let them be!’ and later when they’re young adults, they are set in their ways and cannot be changed. They are poor and will always be poor because they are uneducated, all they can do is mix cement and sit in guardhouses. They are poor, so they drink, which makes them more poor; this makes them sadder, so they drink some more. Their parents say ‘help them!’

How? It’s too late.”

Traditional media has a way of reaching the local communities that the internet can’t, not just because they might now have internet connections where they are but because there is something about an article in the newspaper that says something about an organisation’s reliability. Aside from that, it doesn’t take any effort or commitment to comment on a post on Facebook, but it takes a certain amount of conviction and investment in a situation to call a phone number on a newspaper article, talk to a receptionist and wait to be transferred before asking for help from a complete stranger.

Hopefully, after meeting with him and discussing the situation with him, we can help him and his people in the future.

There’s No Shame in Being Shameless

My first experience with the media in a completely professional capacity could have gone slightly better, in my opinion. I’ve already brushed shoulders with a few members of the press from various newspapers, be it reporters or camera-people. However, those experiences have been informal at best, and these experiences I am about to share have to do with being professional and perhaps the shamelessness that comes with it.

After the Global Goals Health: and Wellbeing Workout on the 23^rd of September (please read my previous blogpost, *Feel the Burn* to read up on the details of the event) we’ve had to monitor the publications of our media releases, as per usual. Only the Borneo Post had confirmed they would publish us, due to the reporter herself attending the event, however the others were reliant on the media releases we had sent to them via fax and email. And the event was held on a Wednesday evening, leaving only Friday for the newspapers to publish my article.

Therein lay my first challenge.

Let me explain. On weekends, local newspapers in Miri have a tendency to publish paraphrased articles found online, oftentimes trending in the Miri Community Facebook community. This is usually because they are short on staff, who take the weekend off. This leads to two days where my press release would be ignored at the fax machine, buried in a pile of other such press releases from other people, till the translators and senior reporters came in on Monday. I had to call around 4.40 pm on Sunday to ensure that my media release was on the top of the pile, much to the chagrin of the office boy who was in the newsroom at the time.

Now here comes my second challenge. I had to be shameless.

My supervisor informed me that she didn’t quite care how, but my article had to be in at least 3 newspapers within that week. No pressure, right? The heat was on the moment she didn’t care how.

So for the next day I was calling the different newspapers and pitching my event to them as calmly or frantically as the situation required. English speaking newspapers required more decorum, while the Mandarin newspapers seemed to be more responsive when I spoke passionately about the article. With the risk of sounding slightly unprofessional, me and my fellow intern, Chen Hau Yung, managed to get most of the Mandarin newspapers to publish simply by calling them three to four times that day, assuring them that they were ‘missing out on an internationally trending event’ and gave the vague allusion that their readers would think they were out of date for missing said opportunity.

It worked, they agreed to publish it.

My joy was short lived, as I realised that in my desperation to get my newspapers published, I had behaved in what I considered to be an unprofessional manner, or rather, a manner of the wrong profession. I had behaved like a door-to-door salesperson, if any profession at all.

However, to my relief, my supervisor then explained to me that while Public Relations may be done differently elsewhere, this was exactly how to talk to a reporter here in Miri. At the end of the day, it came down to the same two things. Confidence, and one solid fact.

While we were embarrassed when calling, we didn’t let it show, so we had managed to portray ourselves as confident when we felt anything but. We pressed on in the faith that the Global Goals that we were representing, specifically the third global goal, would be a famous enough incident that would speak for itself and get the newspapers to publish our involvement in it. In this case, our mission was a success.

Sometimes what we aren’t comfortable in doing or consider unprofessional is really all that is required in Public Relations. Basically, be shameless in asking for coverage and promoting our organisation’s beneficial activities. I believe it was a lesson well learnt.

All I can hope is the next time, I see these reporters, they won’t hold that shamelessness against me. Here’s to hoping.

Feel the burn!

Well folks, I’ve just had my first experience in organising an event!

On the 23^rd of September, I was charged with holding an employee relations event, which was the Global Goals: Health and Wellbeing Workout. This event consisted of a cardio workout for the staff members within Interhill Headquarters, and was inspired and held in conjunction with the Global Goals #3, which was Health and Wellbeing. In this event, we encouraged our staff to adopt a healthier and more active lifestyle in their daily lives.

There were, of course, quite a few challenges and lessons learned in the organising of this event. I’ll just jump straight to them.

Challenges:

1. Talking to people outside of the organisation

-          I had to talk to ACE Fitness Gym, in Miri, and somehow confirm with them that we would be using their gym and attending a cardio class for FREE. It took persuasion and a formal proposal letter but we managed to assure them that the amount of publicity they would receive from the media coverage of our event would be more than enough.

2.   I had to convince employees to attend.

You would think this wouldn’t be a challenge…but you would be wrong. Employee cooperation is a hard thing to come by, and I had to market this event to many employees simply to get a handful of people to attend the event, that was designed entirely for them. No one tells you how complicated and redundant this can seem, but really it is a necessary evil because without events like these, employees feel less included in the company.

Lessons learned:

1. Be confident in yourself, and others will be confident in you. For those people within ACE Fitness Gym, I wasn’t ‘the intern’, I was a public relations officer, not because I misrepresented myself but because I behaved in a way that showed that I wasn’t scared to be frank with them and to do my duty for the organisation without being pushed around by my ‘elders’.

2. Be friendly! The whole reason for the event was for employee relations, and though I am only temporary asset to the group, I still felt as though I was a part of them. Employees want to feel like they are accepted within their organisation, not simply utilized. Therefore we helped to bridge the gap between departments and employees with this event, where we all got together and practiced healthier lifestyle habits together.

At the end of the day, we really DID feel the burn of that cardio workout, but we walked away better and closer together as an organisation, so it truly was a worthwhile experience for me.

Handling PR disasters and issues

Hello everyone

I thought it would be interesting for my third blog post to detail some challenges and disasters I have seen unfold before me at my PR internship. Perhaps this will be an entertaining read for you, and you might like to share a comment or two about your own experiences.

In PR, there are many possible issues, and potential crises that can arise in a workplace. We have learnt, through our university education, that there are specific step-by-step processes are put in place to prevent the disaster from happening in the first place, to manage it has it happens, and to cope with the effects afterwards.

I've found sometimes the structured protocols of issues management fly out the window when a challenge is happening, and happening fast.

I have also discussed how they were handled, or how they could have been prevented:

Last minute cancellations to an event
While it is extremely inconsiderate to change ones RSVP a couple of hours before an important event, it does happen. The effect of last minute cancellations can spell disaster, especially if the event relies on as many numbers as possible.
Unfortunately a situation like this did happen at my work placement within hours of an event commencing. While it did not affect the day, it did leave the organiser/host stressed and anxious. I feel like this could have been avoided.
Here are some ideas which may have prevented this from happening, or at least from having a negative impact on the day.

• On the original invite, specify a certain amount of "notice" required, or a deadline, to change ones RSVP; allowing PR officers to make changes and adaptions if need be. Of course, there are special circumstances that cannot be avoided and this must be considered. 
• Have some sort of forum, where staff can keep track of attendees, and regularly update the information about the upcoming event to ensure people remain interested and do not forget about it. One way this can be done is through Facebook events. 
• Contact guests to monitor their RSVP, without being intrusive. Sometimes, for example, venues call their reservation guests to ensure they are still attending their reservation, as well as to give them a gentle reminder in case they forgot. Perhaps one phone call or email a week before the event to all guests would be sufficient, especially if invites were sent out long before that. Most guests would appreciate the courtesy call. It is important to make sure all guest details are accurate!
• Do not panic if there ARE last minute cancellations on the day! The remaining guests will notice if the host is panicking or nervous, and this will affect the vibe of the event. 
• Contact the venue if numbers drastically change. The worst look is when an event venue has allocated too many tables or too much space for a smaller number of people. Venues will often be preparing for the event all day and will be able to adapt to changes in numbers. 

A very important media release leak 
My workplace was planning to release an announcement in regards to an upcoming event, which was leaked by a mysterious person in the department. The PR staff only found out when they received an unexpected media enquiry. Safe to say, the office was tense the next day.

In this sort of situation, it is absolutely crucial for all members of staff are completely aware of the protocols of releasing information, especially press releases, to the media. In many organisations, there is a dedicated officer who releases all statements to the media. While this system has always been in place, the person who leaked the document did not know about these protocols.

In hindsight, I would have:

• Had a meeting with the PR department and refresh on the protocols of training and ensure everyone is on the same page.
• Request feedback on the protocols and judge whether they need amending. It is important for all staff members to be involved.
• Send an email across the whole organisation regarding the media communication protocols, to ensure it is understood across all divisions.
• ensure the person who incorrectly released the statement to the media is well informed of what the protocols are for the future.

Its important to quickly deal with the issue if its too late for prevention. Unfortunately, staff had to respond to the media enquiries earlier than anticipated. Good communication is absolutely essential in this situation. Staff had to be sure to communicate the exact facts of the release and make sure the media knew all the correct details, rather than basing their stories on the draft which was accidentally released.

Here is a question! Have you witnessed or experienced a PR issue or disaster at your internship, and if so, how was it dealt with?

I look forward to a comment or two!

Til next time,

Greta Jasiak (17059387)