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.

Emails and realising mistakes

Part of my role within the Western Force media team is covering and writing about the PINDAN Premier Grade, the top tier of senior rugby in Western Australia. To put it into perspective, if you compared it to Australian football, it would be like the WAFL is to the AFL. With that in mind, it is important when writing about these teams that you keep their brand in mind, and ensure the articles, reviews and press releases you write accurately reflect the brands the clubs are intending to promote. 

When writing these pieces, we attempt to communicate and relate to the club rugby community by occasionally referring to clubs by the nicknames they have coined over the years, for example Wests Scarborough = 'Wests' or 'The Boars', Cottesloe could be called 'Cott' or 'The Gulls' and Perth Bayswater could be referred to as 'Baysie' or 'The Numbats'. 

To my surprise, I logged into my work emails, the standard email address for every media intern that has ever been through RugbyWA to find an email from a person high up in the Palmyra Ruby Club. It read; 

"Hi there,

Just a small thing. When writing about Palmyra can you refer to us as “Pally” not “Paly” as this is a brand we are trying to promote.

Thanks very much

Best regards,

Steve (not his real name)."

I was originally worried when I first saw this, thinking I had made a big mistake, but soon realised that not all mistakes are bad ones. I had never previously been warned about this, and after re-reading the email I realised that the person sending it was not actually upset or angry about the mistake, he was simply giving me a heads up for next time. 

I since took the advice on board, and have continuously referred to Palmyra as 'Pally', not 'Paly' in all forms of Premier Grade stakeholder communication. 

Luke. 

Entering the daunting, real working world of PR... wasn't so bad after all.

Hello all,

This blog post is a reflection on my very first week as a PR intern. Actually, make that my first time doing work experience anywhere!

Even as a third year university-level PR student, I constantly struggle with confidence, especially in putting my PR knowledge into professional practice, outside of a university context. Thus, beginning my PR internship in a real-life, pumping PR and marketing department was a daunting task.

My application to intern at the City of Swan's PR and Marketing department was a success, and it was decided that I would work at the office two days a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays), to assist them with their tourism projects under the scope of marketing and PR. To prepare myself, I had a read of the City of Swan's media kit for the Swan Valley. In hindsight, it definitely helped my for the next two weeks ahead. It helped me gain an insight to the City's key points it wants to bring to the attention of the media. For example, the fact that it's Australia's first Humane Food region!

After meeting with my supervisors in early May, I began my internship on Tuesday 26 May, 2015.

My first day was exciting and full-on! I got straight into a number of tasks. It was clear that my supervisors had confidence in me which, in turn, made me more confident. The biggest focus of the day was finding target media for one of the City's biggest tourism projects, where they will be involving a major international media market in a huge tour of the Swan Valley. It's an exciting project to be involved in. This task totally opened my eyes to the vast array of food and wine and lifestyle media around the globe and in Australia. It also helped me to get smart about how to hunt for this very specific sort of media on the internet.

I have quickly come to understand that many local governments have tight budgets, which means marketing and PR are often combined into the one department. Perhaps this may cause conflicts of interest or ethical issues. Are we trying to sell the businesses? Or connect the local Government with local businesses and other key stakeholders and create a great relationship and sense of communication? In my opinion, its a bit of both.

My second day interning at the City of Swan, on Thursday 28 May, was amazing. I was extremely lucky to be asked to accompany my supervisor on an industry tour of the Swan Valley. It was a brilliant community relations activity. Industry people from all over the Swan Valley, including representatives from the City of Swan, were taken on an informative tour of a bunch of businesses in the Valley. The idea was to connect neighbouring businesses, bring them all together and strengthen their relationships. With any luck, they would also recommend each other in complimentary ways to their own patrons, and just be more informed about the businesses around them and what they have to offer.

On one hand, this activity had a sales and marketing focus. For me, the challenge was to see past the clear marketing focuses. However, I did realise PR was also heavily involved. Especially in the way that it created communication between local government, local businesses and eventually the public. As a representative of the City of Swan, I was able to meet and communicate with local business owners who are key stakeholders to the City. During the day, I visited the Swan Valley Visitors Centre at the oldest courthouse in WA - situated in Guilford. From there, I visited Mandoon Estate, Whistlers Chocolate, Oakford Grounds, Mondo Nougat, Moorish Nuts, The Vines, The Cheese Barrel and Fig Tree Wines. A lovely perk was being able to sample some incredible local food and wine, and see how these local businesses were promoting the Humane Food Initiative.

Below is a photo of the amazing cheese boards we were offered by the Cheese Barrel. The Cheese Barrel pairs their platters with Neighbouring Olive Farm Wines; WA's oldest established winery. A great example of businesses working together! (The cheese was fantastic, BTW).

In hindsight, this day also was able to help me significantly in my upcoming PR activities for the City of Swan, which I will discuss in my upcoming posts.

Til next time,
Greta Jasiak (17059387)

#publicrelations #internship #cityofswan #swanvalley #swanvalleytourism #humanefood #stakeholders #bentleycampus #gretajasiak #17059387

Busy and working hard...

It has been several weeks since I last wrote my blog. How's everyone doing?

I had been preparing for the seminar and there were a lot of work that were needed to be done; however, the seminar has been delayed as one of the speaker's daughter was sick and was admitted to hospital. Due to that reason, my colleagues and I needed to reschedule our plan and informed those who were involved in the seminar.

After settling what needed to be done, there was nothing we could do except to wait for the speaker's news. In the meanwhile, I was assigned to media reading by Tris. There were heaps of newspapers and homes & lifestyle magazines prepared by Tris for me to find out news that would affect our business as a property management company as well as the prices, promotions and advertising strategies that our competitors have been using recently. Media reading is not enjoyable at all. In fact, it is really boring, which I almost dozed off reading those news and articles, but endured till the end nonetheless.  

For the fun part, I get to send E-mails to the company's stakeholders (not only clients but also the contractors) for testimonial. In property management business, testimonial is the most critical part that clients based on to make decisions as they are unable to evaluate our service in prior to their purchase, and a good testimonial means a higher chance of getting selected by our clients. To increase credibility, I'm required to get signatures, contact details and photos from the person who provided the testimonial. However, it was really difficult to get photos from them. There were only a few who provided me with complete information but the rest of them procrastinated or gave excuses when I started asking them for photos. 

Besides all those stuff that I'm doing, I'm also required to design a logo for the 20-unit apartment that has been built in Victoria Park, which is called King's View and Homes Property Management is in charge of its sales. I felt quite happy because my work will be created into a real logo and one day I'm going to see my logo on that apartment. It took me quite a long time to come out with a design that is appealing to every stakeholder group, but while designing the logo, I felt that it is less difficult as my Photoshop skills are getting better and better.

King's View logo design

Throughout these weeks, I have learnt a lot of skills and knowledge about being a PR practitioner. Moreover, I could see myself improving in many areas and more ready to join the workforce. I will keep up the good work!

It is a very busy but a very meaningful week for me. Until next time.

Leong Chee Lek

16316641

Being a socially conscious PR consultancy

Hi Everyone,

In my report I'm just about to start writing my recommendations to Savvy Creations which will outline its areas of improvement and areas of strength. After reflecting on the firm's areas of strength, something I've found really admirable is the way in which Savvy Creations places charity and not-for-profit organisations at such a high priority. My mentor at Savvy Creations who is also the Director, Sandra Spasojevic, goes about exercising its  Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) to help out those companies who may not have the big budgets to afford PR professionals to promote their cause to the public.

An example of this is Savvy Creations' client, a bottled water company who are a charitable organisation that gives over half of its profits to international charities. There are 3 different bottle caps which represent different charity sectors; the red bottle caps donate funds to health orientated charities, green bottle caps donate funds to environmental charities and blue caps donate money to clean drinking water projects in developing countries. It really is a great initiative where by buying a bottle of water,  people can contribute just a small donation to important causes without going out of their way to do so.

Savvy Creations offers free initial consultations and pro-bono work as part of their mission to help smaller companies, thus strengthening their CSR to the local Perth community. I think this is becoming a greater expectation that in the PR industry, firms need to be socially aware of the economic climate  smaller companies and charities are in where they don't necessarily have the big budgets to hire a PR consultant who could make their brand even more recognisable.

This definitely resonated with what I've learnt throughout my studies at Curtin, especially in the PR consultancy unit, where CSR and community engagement is crucial in order to maintain a positive reputation in the industry as stakeholder expectations are growing where by giving back to the community from firms is becoming a priority. After all, the fundamentals of PR that I learnt way back in PR Principles is that the role of PR in society is to create mutually benefit relationships between firms and their stakeholders...so why not create these relationships directly between the PR firm and the community which they practice in?

Something to think about!

Tahlia

Don't forget to evaluate...

From my three years at Curtin University, I’ve seen the ‘Don’t forget to evaluate’ tab appear in Blackboard every semester. There’s usually an incentive for an individual to complete the evaluation, but it’s just a great chance to help give feedback on the units you studied in that particular semester too.

I’ve been contributing to evaluate for the past three years. But it wasn’t until my experience at Skye Gilligan Consulting that I realised the significance of monitoring and evaluating how successful a unit is, or in my case, a strategy is to an organisation.

Throughout my 20-day placement, I was implementing strategic communications for one of Skye’s

major clients, a two-way radio organisation named The Orion Network. Some of these strategies included updates to the ‘News’, ‘Events’, ‘Case Studies’ and ‘Product’ tabs on the website as well as developing and sending out MailChimp campaigns. These strategies were to promote the organisation’s activities and engage with stakeholders.

But was the communication effective? This was the question in which clients expected to see results and whether their investment in public relations paid off.

Through Google analytics, I was able to select the dates and times, meta-data, specific media sources (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, etc.) and other ways in which consumers visited the Orion website.

From this information, I created tables of key statistics and summarised some of the changes, in comparison to the previous Google analytics report.

The results were incredible! I discovered that the increase in social media strategies had boosted traffic to the website and the duration of each visit to the site was longer.

This was a positive reinforcement of the work Skye and I had completed to increase stakeholder engagement with the organisation.

Although I’ve completed my placement at Skye Gilligan Consulting, I’ve learnt so many new things to which I can apply in the PR industry as well as everyday circumstances.

I’ve realised the significance of monitoring and evaluating a unit, a strategy, a placement, etc. and I’m sure there’s so much more to learn along my PR journey.

So here comes my evaluation…

PR 393 has provided me with a once in a lifetime opportunity to gain real-life experience in the PR industry. My time at Skye Gilligan Consulting was filled with excitement, learning and development and building strong relationships. I look forward to pursuing a career in public relations and I feel industry ready to take on whatever the world of PR has in store for me.

Event Planning-It's not all glitz and glamour!

The last 3 weeks of my Internship I have spent 99% of my time working on event management/planning. The annual Pre-budget submission and AGM is an extremely important event on the WACOSS calendar, however with only 3 weeks to go until the event there was very little organised. With so much to organise in a short amount of time, My director relied on me to work with the Communications officer to ensure that everything was ready for the day. This included a range of tasks including drafting invites, promotional flyers, Agendas, as well as general event tasks such as catering and venue set-up.

My first task was to finalise the list of stakeholders and public figures to be invited to the event. It seemed like a simple task, but I soon realised just how important the stakeholders of WACOSS were and how vital it was that none were missed.  The list ranged from head of government departments, to Ministers, to CEO’s of prominent WA not-for profits such as Red Cross and St Vincent De Paul. As I made my way through the list updating contact details for all the stakeholders all I could think was wow. There were a lot of influential people on this list,  It made me realise the importance of the event I was going to be working on. It also made me realise how important WACOSS and its activities actually were, To have regular contact with government ministers is something many not-for-profits would strive for. WACOSS is extremely lucky to have such a strong network of support with its stakeholders to say the least.

These Stakeholders remained at the back of my mind for every task I completed for the pre-budget submission and AGM. These were important people; therefore everything had to be absolutely perfect. Having the task of creating the promotional flyers and invite meant I had to somehow master InDesign within a few days. In the office all promotional items are made on InDesign, and when comparing the results with Word documents I can understand why. The professionalism and creativity of InDesign documents definitely trumps Word. Although it took me countless Google searches and YouTube videos I managed to create both an invite and promotional flyer that met the design and content elements sought after by the Director. Particularly In the field of PR where presentation is of high importance, learning to use InDesign Is a skill I will definitely take from my internship and use in the future. 

The lead up to the event was hectic to say the least, my job was to make sure that not one thing was overlooked. Name badges, Catering, registration lists, Banners, Promo materials, Task lists, VIP bios, you name it. It was all my responsibility. When I was first told I was working on event planning for the AGM I didn’t for a second think that there would be so many different aspects to cover. By sitting down with the Communications manager and writing down exactly what needed to be done I realised that there is A LOT of work that goes in to running a successful event. It was definitely good to step back and see all the tiny things you have to consider for an event to run smoothly.

 Most young PR students percieve event planning  to be desirable career, full of glitz and glamour.  My experience has taught me that it is far from that.  However, having the opportunity to work on an event, and be in the same room as so many influential members of the not-for-profit sectior has been an invaluable experience. My main lesson learnt from this is Organisation is they key to success. A successful event will be planned, monitored and executed following a well detailed plan that provides clear direction.

So would I consider working in an events based role in the future? yes. I loved being able to see everything come together, the weeks planning was definitely worth the end result.

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

Social Media – Not a Means to an End

Well it is full steam ahead, where has all of the time gone!

I am thoroughly enjoying my placement at the City of Perth and quite honestly never want to leave.

From the PR placement blogs that I have seen so far, social media is a popular topic. Rather than writing a blog highlighting the importance of social media (which I am sure is a general consensus), I thought I would discuss the importance of viewing social media as just one of many communication tools.

Increasingly social media is utilised as the ‘go to’ tool for communicating with stakeholders, sometimes at the expense of utilising other effective communication tools.

The PR units at Curtin are structured appropriately in the way that social media is only one component of the units which is beneficial as it is important to educate students that there are a variety of useful communication methods.

In my opinion the City of Perth utilise social media in an effective and efficient manner in order to communicate with stakeholders and realise that social media is just one communication tool.

On Friday 30^th August the City of Perth Communication Team organised for The Project to do a live cross for their Metro Whip Around section. The theme for the cross was Fathers’ Day and therefore the cross promotion was a Fathers’ Day special and involved a promotion of Sunday’s Piazzarama Northbridge.

For the live cross we needed fathers and children in the background to illustrate the Fathers’ Day theme. As there were no City of Perth events scheduled at the right time (making it easy to gain a crowd) we put the following call out on social media;  

 

As popular as the Facebook post was with 50 likes, 5 comments and 12 shares, the main reason for the crowd turnout was through utilising other communication methods including face to face communication. If the City of Perth relied solely on social media then the live cross would not have been as successful as it was.

If you would like to see the Perth Metro Whip Around click here and skip forward to 41:35.

I would love to hear your feedback on this blog, despite whether you agree or disagree.

Until next time, keep enjoying your placements!

Rachel.

(Written: 8^th September 2013)

Reference:

The Project, Friday 30 August. 2013. The Project. http://tenplay.com.au/channel-ten/the-project/2013/8/30.

There is a fine line between what is professional and what isn't

Throughout my time working at the Perth Wildcats, I have come to understand the way the other staff act around each other, how they treat the customers and the overall atmosphere around the office.

My first couple of times going to the Wildcats I noticed how all the men wore suit and ties and the ladies mostly wore skirts or work pants. I felt this immediately sets the tone for potential stakeholders when they come into the office and see how the staff are presented. If the staff were dressed in a more casual manner, they may send out the wrong message to others.

Once I got more familiar with my surroundings and understood where my place was within the company, I began to notice how the other staff members treated each other. All of the staff are seen to be equal, no matter what their title is. Even the CEO of the company is rostered on the clean the kitchen! The staff are all extremely friendly with one another, often acting more like siblings with the play fights and jokes that are happening. Whilst the staff may have fun with each other they also know when to be serious. They all get their jobs done and work extremely hard. In all the times I have been there I have never seen one staff member arrive after 8:30am or leave before 5:30pm.

I have also noticed that they treat the Wildcats players in a friendly, yet professional, manner. There is absolutely no fraternising with the players. This would be one of the most unprofessional acts one could do when working in a company like the Perth Wildcats. Whilst it is exciting to see the players and get to know them off the court, without them there would be no business.

Keeping thing professional in every way is one of the most important things I have seen whilst completing my internship. Every person that walks through the doors is treated like they own the company. None of the staff are seen to be better than anyone else but most of all they carry out their professionalism in a manner that makes each one of them approachable.