Officially Correct!

Hi everyone!

This is my second blog post and at this point I have completed my 4th week at the Association for the Blind of WA- Guide Dogs WA (I will refer to as the ABWA). Work has really started to pick up and the importance of ensuring that correct procedures are being followed so that every aspect of work meets official protocol is becoming more and more evident. As I mentioned in my first blog, due to the not-for-profit nature of our organisation there are so many tasks that our team is involved in. This has allowed me as an intern to be involved with a range of different projects from writing media releases for one department within the organisation, to planning events such as the ABWA Open Day.

One of my main tasks at the moment however is working with the organisers of Perth Fashion Festival (PFF), as the ABWA has been chosen as a community sponsor of the festival for this year. This is a fantastic opportunity for the Association in regards to raising awareness, getting our key messages out to the public and raising funds for the Association. Throughout our work with the festival, the importance of ongoing communication and ensuring every aspect follows official protocol has become blaringly obvious to me. This year, clients and Guide Dogs from ABWA are performing and attending events at PFF, and ongoing communication both within the Assoication and with PFF is vital to ensure the safety of not only our clients and dogs, but also to audience members and other attendees to the events. Two of the Associations clients are performing at a PFF event, and due to their vision impairment, my team and I have had to work very closely with the organsier of this particular event to ensure measures are in place to ensure the safety of everyone involved. For example, tactile markers on the fashion runway need to be in place to ensure our clients know where to go on the catwalk and to ensure they don't fall off the platform. When Guide Dogs are performing or attending events, our team must coordinate with the Guide Dog Department and PFF to ensure the safety of the dogs. An example of this is was coordinating with PFF to ensure that a Guide Dog Trainer/Instructor could be present at certain events where Guide Dogs are performing, which was requested by the Guide Dog Department to ensure the safety of the dogs at the event. As you can imagine, there is a lot of back and forth, ongoing communication between our team and various people involved, but this is necessary to ensure that policies and procedures are followed so the event can run smoothly.

The importance of following procedures to ensure work is 'officially correct' has also become obvious when writing press releases and articles. I wrote my very first press release this week, and as you can imagine I was so excited when I got the tick of approval to send away to newspapers and media outlets! The media release was about encouraging members from the community to apply to become Puppy Raisers for the Association - here is the link if you want to have a look http://www.guidedogswa.com.au/resources/puppy_raisers_media_release.pdf. Once I had written my draft, I had to send it through to our communications person for approval of the content, and then to the Guide Dog department to ensure that all the relevant information had been included. This procedure had to be followed to ensure that everything written in the media release was officially correct, and luckily the departments within ABWA are very well connected so this process didn't take long at all! Finally, I had to check with our communications person on the usual procedure for sending out media releases to outlets before going ahead to ensure consistency when dealing with external parties.

One final example of following official procedures was the announcement and presentation of ABWA receiving a grant from the State Government. In what was a very short and small scale event, MLC Donna Faragher, on behalf of the Premier of WA, visited ABWA to announce that ABWA has been selected to recieve funding under the State Government's Social Enterprise Fund. Whilst this was a small scale event, this official announcement needed to be paired with official protocol in regards to Public Relations. This meant that myself, along with our communications representative attended the event to take photos, and to gain relevant information to allow us to write up a news article to publicise the event on the ABWA website. Here is the link to the article if you want to read http://www.guidedogswa.com.au/articles/latest-news/funding-strengthens-social-enterprise.

So, over these past 2 weeks I have learnt that even the smallest of events, announcements or communications need to be met with official protocol to ensure that information is correct. This is important to allow ABWA to continue to engage with its stakeholders on an ongoing basis.