You Can’t Help Them All

I have some sad news today.

For those that have read my previous blogpost, I Saw You in the Newspaper! , there has been some development in the case of RumahAmpik. To recap, in my previous post I mentioned that our Corporate Communications office was contacted by a man called Mr. William concerning including his children into our After School Project (ASP). 

Today, after a meeting with one of our board of directors, it was decided that RumahAmpik, at this time, is not a feasible community to foster due to the need for trained mentors with more experiences in dealing with problematic children as well as the fact that we have three other communities in our care.

I had suspected for a while that this would be the outcome of the case, but it does not change the sadness in my heart. Perhaps when the ASP is more established, and the mentors more well trained or rather if ASP has the ability to train the mentors that are already dedicated to the project, we can attempt such a thing with RumahAmpik. Till then, RumahAmpik has to stand and face this alone.

This situation, however, has taught me a little something in balancing the good of the company with the good of the community. CSR is never the priority of an organization, it is simply an obligation they have to cater to in order to continue their businesses as they please. In our case, the ASP has never been a priority in time or funding from our organization. I understand that in this specific case, ASP was truly unequipped to handle more problematic children under its care, and had to cede the opportunity to a later date, if at all.

I maintain, however, that in fulfilling an organizations corporate social responsibility the end goal of doing ‘just enough’ just isn’t enough. One day, people will look back and realize a company has done the bare minimum for their community and then they will demand compensation. One day, that organization they will be forced to realize that while they can’t help them all, they can certainly try.

So the adventure has begun! :)

The time has come! A new year! New start! I did my internship for one and a half months, which is from 1st January 2015 to 15 February 2015. Excited? Yes. Nervous? You bet. This internship journey is full of plans, excitements and unknowns whereby it will definitely push me to explore a completely new world and culture.

Hello, I’m WanYing, a 21-year old girl from Malaysia, full-time Curtin University student; undergraduate in Bachelor of Arts. Currently pursuing in Mass Communication and majoring in Public Relations Stream.

sneak peak of my working place!
however, some of the interiors are prohibited to take photo so certain picture are 3D graphics design :)

I am a current intern in I-SPA Recreation Resort, which provides services in the hospitality industry. I-SPA is a Johor Bahru-based company and known as one of the leading one-stop recreation resorts with tip top facilities and buffet based food services (food & beverage). They also provide entertainment and facilities pertaining living & beauty. It is also the largest & facility-filled family recreation resort in Malaysia with 100,000sqft, which offers guests enjoyment in the higher standards of services with a reasonable price. 

The internship in I-SPA was my first experience being an intern and obtaining working experience in the Public Relations field. Finally, I came out of it with a better idea of how is it to be a “grown up” and I feel that it was great start.

About the work itself, it has been a good experience so far. The first thing to do every morning is the basic daily task, such as media monitoring, media clipping, administrating company website & social media and so on. Besides that, every department also needs to attend meetings every morning, as our company believes communication will help motivate, build trust and provide a way for employees to express themselves as well as let every department can exchange information to understand different people at all levels of organization. In addition, my company has an interesting procedure when it comes to running these said meetings. Everyone participated in taking turns emceeing every day, so we have the chance to learn and improve ourselves. During this, the emcee also needs prepare and shares latest news article. Personally, I think that it has been a great chance for everyone to be updated on what’s happening in the world. Definitely, working as a PR person, one should be aware of latest updated news and trends.

In a nutshell, everything was better than I imagined. Stepping out of my comfort zone gave me self-confidence, determination to achieve better and without doubt a good start to a new year. With this internship, I feel like this year ought to be the most amazing year in my life.

Hope you all enjoying your placement as well! Happy Interning!

Till my next post,
WanYing

Feature stories and meetings mark the 3/4 milestone

Hi everyone!

I am now 15 days into my internship and since my last blog entry, I have been more involved in the meetings happening at DSR. I really enjoy these as I get to witness what goes on behind the scenes in planning a new initiative and how communications play a huge part in it, such as the Outdoors October initiative. At the Outdoors October meeting, I got to see how they plan out their events, PR strategy and campaigns, social media strategy and media strategy (which I can't disclose much due to the confidentiality).

I also got to participate in the divisional meeting. Since the communications division falls under the policy division, both the communications and policy divisions meet once a month and go around the table to update everyone on what they have been working on. It was really interesting to see how communications integrate everything together (I wish I could elaborate more but can't due to confidentiality once again).

Another thing that also happens once a month is the entire DSR staff meeting. At this meeting, everyone within the department and in their regional offices (via webcam) gets together and hears the latest significant updates. It was a pretty short meeting compared to the weekly team meetings and the monthly divisional meetings.

I also finalised writing and editing the four stories I was assigned to for the Chronicle publication. Through this experience, I got to learn and receive plenty of feedback about writing feature stories, how to make lead paragraphs attractive and how to tailor general news to a specific audience. I also learnt that if somebody is too busy to give a quote, it is best to make one up for them and get their approval.

An ironic thing I experienced was that even though next week will be my last week at the DSR, my orientation training was scheduled last week. It was here where I got to meet two other interns (one from ECU and one from Notre Dame) who were also completing their placements at the DSR but in different divisions. The orientation training also gave me an insight into my second major, Human Resource Management.

I am still doing the media monitoring every time when I come in and over the past few weeks, I have come to appreciate how important it is. At the last communications team meeting, they were discussing new ideas on how to improve media monitoring, especially in regards to effectively monitoring and clipping regional news. 

I am going to be pretty sad when I finish my internship with the DSR. I have been learning so much and got to meet amazing people along the way.

Well, that's all for now! Till next time when I write my final blog post to reflect my final day at DSR!

Michelle

Magazine Executives = Sales Executives

I recently sat in on two meetings we had with magazine publications, ‘Scoop’ and ‘Wedding and Bride’. Lamont’s are looking to place advertisement pieces in print publications to inform readers that Smiths Beach Lamont’s do offer weddings and inform them of how much a wedding package would cost and the various things included within that. ‘Wedding and Bride’ is a longstanding publication in Victoria and has only very recently been transferred over to Perth. It is a directory for brides to be and has everything from cakes to venues to dresses to cars. Therefore it would be an ideal publication for Lamont’s to advertise their wedding packages in. As this was the first ever meeting with an employee from a magazine publication I was very surprised how they acted and how very similar magazine executives are to sales representatives. They came out to the Swan Valley and discussed the pricing of a quarter page, ½ page, single page and double page in the magazine. I didn’t realise just how expensive it is for businesses to pay for advertising and how much magazines rely on businesses to want to appear in their magazines.

Magazine executives are similar to sales executives are they are overall trying to persuade you to purchase “space” in their magazine. They genuinely both seemed very disappointed when we told them we needed to think about if and what amount of space we would like to buy in their publication. Both of the sales representatives from ‘Scoop’ and ‘Wedding and Bride’ knew their publications in great depth and overall believed their publication was the best suit for us. Companies need to think long and hard about whether their target market will read the particular magazine and whether or not it will be worthwhile for them to purchase space in the magazine. The magazines offer monthly payments, which does make it easier for the business, however some don’t offer a readership profile, where we can determine who has purchased the magazines and of what demographic they are. It would be interesting to know who purchased the magazine and who contacted Lamont’s after reading it (either via phone, email or even viewed the website).   

Online advertising really is the way to go when a business is on a tight budget. By advertising over multiple platforms, including print, online, radio and television it broadens viewers chance of spotting the advertisement. However it all comes down to what your advertising budget is and who your target audience are (in terms of what they read, listen to and watch). What is going to gain the most readership and by which group of people? There needs to be some way to analyse this and I realised recently that when you create a business Facebook page you are informed at the top of the page of how many of your Facebook “friends” saw the post, how many of them liked it and how many commented. This is incredibly handy, as it allows the business to understand who views the post and whether they prefer photographs to text (and various other things).  

Overall it was incredibly interesting sitting in on the meetings with the magazine executives as it allowed me to understand how magazines make the majority of their money and how important it is for businesses to advertise over a range of platforms in order to gain sales.