Hi everyone,

I hope your internships are going well. I still enjoy mine very much but time management is not one of my strenghts so I find it hard to keep up with the work at the organisation (freehands) and the assingments for my other modules at university. Anyway, let's talk about some of the work I do for freehands.

As I said in my previous post, we are at the "development and definition stage" of the organisation so it is a perfect timing for my internship. When I first started, freehands wanted to work with the big NGOs in Perth (e.g. Red Cross, Salvation Army, Big Brother, Big Sister, etc.) I conducted some in-depth interviews with some of these big organisations to examine what are their needs concerning young volunteers aged 18-35 and if they were willing to use the freehands' website in the future. It was a really interesting task as it involved a bit of research (which I really enjoy doing in general) on the organisations and my PR skills ! YAY!

I built a questionnaire and identified the organisations with my boss and called them on my own. I applied the rule "a real PR officer picks up the phone and call, call, call, until the job is done" and it did work most of the time for a first contact. Those people are really busy so unfortunately for me, I had to send most of the interviews via email and get the answers a few days later. However, the good point is that the feedbacks allowed us to change freehands' strategy towards the targeted organisations as we realised that the big NGOs did not really need a website like ours to attract young volunteers as they already have a database full of them. This time, I identified (on my own) some medium-size NGOs based in Perth metro area, called and conducted some more in-depth interviews. Thanks to that, freehands is now focussing on these organisations as they are more willing to cooperate and use our future website.

The communication with the different NGOs I called went smoothly most of the time but it was a challenge for me to try and explain (or convince) the NGOs why they needed freehands and what we could bring to their organisations even when they were not cooperative at all. I realised that it is not easy when you are a new small (and self funded) organisation to get your projects moving forward and get some support from the "big ones" in the industry. I guess that it is part of the job and I learnt from it.
Did you guys felt anything like that? Any bad experiences that taught you a few tricks that you want to share? They are welcome !

I am really happy with this experience as building networks and a knowledge of the local market is essential for a PR professional and it felt like this was my first step towards it.

Talk to you all soon,

Alix