Big Responsibilities

Venn is in the midst of exciting times. On the 16th of April Venn's new laneway entrance is opening and available for use. The entrance opens right into Raine Square outside the new Bank west building and will include more seating for the café to use. Currently the public has to walk down Queen Street in order to find Venn, this new entrance is going to mean that many people currently unaware of Venn are going to stumble across it.

I have been given the responsibility of creating the publicity plan for the lane way opening. This will involve me creating the plan but also putting it into action including: creating a media release with appropriate angles, approaching certain media outlets with the plan, creating a blog post, Facebook post and Instagram post about the lane way opening and coming up with a promotion on coffee or food to celebrate the opening.

At university we gain a huge amount of experience in creating PR plans, but the plan is completely useless until it’s put into action. We don’t just finish the plan and then file it away (or drop it in our unit coordinators pigeon hole) we have to then follow it and put it into action. It will be a huge learning curve to actually have to approach these media outlets but I'm looking forward to going through the motions with it all.

I’ve already come up with a few good publicity ideas but I’ll save explaining them until I actually know they are going to go through.

Amy Taylor
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Engaging with Internal Stakeholders

Throughout my placement at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry WA (CCIWA), I have been given the opportunity to undertake many tasks ranging from planning events to developing the content of the newly designed CCIWA website. It has been an interesting journey so far and I have learned many skills that I believe I can apply to my future career in public relations.

The majority of my activities undertaken have been related to building and reinforcing relationships with external publics. But what about engaging with the organisation internally?

I was given the responsibility of doing an activity that the External Relations Advisor, Adam Duke, did every morning. It consisted of scanning various news websites for articles that were relevant to commerce and industry in Western Australia (thus the organisation) and sending out a daily digest via e-mail to various members of the office. Within the e-mail was a short description of each article and a respective link. Typical websites that I sourced articles from were PerthNow, WAToday and the Australian.

I began to enjoy this daily ritual and I gained a lot of commerce-specific knowledge from having to read the articles and filter them for relevance. I imagine, if I were to work for CCIWA full-time and if I had to continue to create the daily economics digest I would be very well-versed in business-related current affairs- which is useful considering the seating arrangements in the office next to two economists very keen to discuss how the ASX is fairing every day!

I suppose this 'daily digest' could also be implemented by PR professionals working in various sectors who wish to have more current and in-depth knowledge about the industry they're working in. For instance, if a PR professional were to be working for a sports club, they could compile a daily digest with the latest sports news of the day.

I highly recommend this activity for PR professionals, it should only take 20 minutes a day and as well as being a method of learning invaluable information about your company's specific industry, it also will making conversations in the tea room a lot more high brow and a lot less awkward, as well as being a novel way to keep up internal communication within an organisation.

The 5 rules of having the governor of WA attend your event

This week the other interns and i were given the run down on an event we will have to plan and it's no small, casual event.

FAWWA operates out of two heritage buildings. One is named Tom Collins house (after Joseph Furphy's pen name) and the other is Mattie Furphy house (Joseph Furphy's wife). We have been put in charge of the official opening of Mattie Furphy house. The event will be attended by FAWWA members, committee members and the governor of Western Australia.

The first thing we encountered was the requirements of those running the event the governor is attending. There are actual, formal rules that must that you have to abide by and so i've collected some of the most interesting ones to present to you all;

The 5 rules of having the governor attend your event

1. You must greet the governor at his car.

2. You must play a certain number of bars from the Australian national anthem upon the governors arrival.

3. You must refer to him as his excellency when you first greet him and then governor from then onwards.

4. If you wish for the governor to make a speech , you must write the speech for him and submit it to be approved by him.

5. After the governors attendance has been approved for your event, you must have an official invitation sent to him three months in advance.

I found this really interesting , so i thought i would share it in my blog. I had no idea that there would be these sorts of requirements. It's also going to be a little bit nerve wrecking making sure these requirements are fulfilled!