NO SUCH THING AS OFFICE HOURS

I was lucky enough to have a very flexible placement that allowed me to work the hours per week that the workload required and also allowed the ease of doing work from anywhere via laptop and mobile. This was amazing at first and meant no matter where I was or what I was doing I was able to keep tabs on what was happening. However, it took less then two weeks to realise as great as the flexibility was, it was a slight pain as there really is no such thing as office hours in PR.

Between the organisation, coordination of events, the media relations and social media management, it started to feel like my days never ended. You could wake up to a call at 7am in the morning and still be replying to emails at 11pm at night. It very quickly became exhausting trying to keep up with everyone’s constant demands and expectation that you were available 24 hours a day 7 days a week. I decided pretty quickly that I needed to limit my work hours and times and devised a schedule of how many hours and what exact day I would spend working.

Needless to say, this did not last very long at all. I have the flexibility with my hours but there is no such flexibility in the responsibilities of your job title and description. As the Public Relations and Media Officer for this company I had the responsibility to be accountable no matter the times or day.

This included running stock around for photos shoots on a Sunday afternoon, 8am meetings and nights kept free for events. If you had told me this is what I was in for at the beginning I would have been a little unsure its what I wanted, yet now I realise it comes part of the package of working in public relations. You need to be available sometimes because you don’t always know when the next great opportunity for you brand to be represented will pop up and no good opportunity should be let to just pass by. You also will never know when a crisis may strike; you always need to be at the ready for what any given day may throw at you.

This is the true beauty of Public Relations. Every day truly is different, and you may have to be a little more available but with the sacrifice comes the reward of being able to do a job that you truly enjoy. 

Be Comprehensive & Detail before and after

In the world of Public Relations (PR), we as PR practitioners are required to peruse every line of work performed. Included for even the smallest things that sometimes escape our observation that already encapsulates all of the work to be done in a timeline or checklist. This is not the case record or document in a note that we can see at any time to check what you have and have not done. But to be able to get the essence of the record every work we do and have done as outlined in the form of key learning.

Shared by my PR Managing Director for Healthcare, Beauty, and Consumer division I was intern in, comprehensive detail record is very important to be set in every PR Practitioners as a mindset, in order to take a note and make a report of all the work we have done. For instance, in an events or media gathering there are various work to organize in preparation phase, such as proposal to prepare, press releases content, media invitations, venue selection, MC selections, to detail budget to propose. We might think we have prepared everything in the checklists, but that is not enough, we have to be prepared for the worst as well. Things is not always come smooth without a hitch, that is why anticipation is needed where team should be capable to engage with the situation and communicate as a team. Competency to deal with unexpected situation and solve problem is not come without experience, therefore comprehensive record and report of every work we do and have done is importance as working reference and learning.

One of the situations was from the SINDE event in my first week work as an intern. We got a situation where one of the speakers was delayed. It was crucial situation, which had indefinite taken some allocated time arranged on the checklist and disruption the timeline. This was the time we need to be absorbed with the situation, think fast to solve the problem, and working as a team to adjust the situation. The team addressed the situation at that time by continuously giving instruction to the MC to improvise and provided more questions to be asked to existing speaker, as an anticipation to stipulate more time for the delayed speaker. Our key learning of the situation is to anticipate unprepared situation with a capability to be engaged with the situation and to communicate with other team members.

My learning from the situation is not to be detail only at the current project I work on, yet I need to be comprehensive and detail in my work record and report of the work I have done as reference that will equip me for my future project. We cannot undo what has happened, however past exists for our reference to be better and move forward.

Cheers,

-Indri Ervianti-

12541054/ 110027720

Curtin - LUCT Malaysia

A few days into my intern and I've been spot on the spot!

Hi Fellow PR393 Students!

This is my second blog post, which I will be discussing what I have done so far into my placement and what I will be working on throughout my 20 days with angelhands.

On the second day of my internship, my supervisor got me to start looking through information from the 50k in 50 days fundraising campaign. At first I was quite confuse as to what and why I
had to read through the boring piles of notes and drafts because I was starting to doze off during
work hours. I was trying my best to stay awake! Then before I knew it, I had to familiar myself with all
those documents as I will be working closely with the fundraising committee.

So currently, I'm working on a the 50K in 50 Days fundraising campaign where my first task was to set up a campaign brief so the campaign committee are able to review it and make any necessary changes
before the board meeting. This felt like quite a huge task for me and I could not believe that I was
writing a real life brief with my own ideas for the organisation to follow up on instead for just a university assignment. It made me feel important and I had to be responsible and reliable for the work that I was going to do. But it was also exciting at the same time to see what I could come up with.

I am grateful and glad for what I have learned while studying at Curtin University! If not because
of the practical assignments like writing press releases and/or reports for real life clients, I would not be
able to accomplish the task that I am given by my supervisor.

I was also in given the role of making sure the poster of the campaign would appeal to the public which I had to meet the graphic designer to lead him in the right direction for the campaign which includes my opinion on what looks good and what doesn’t; as well as the information that will be shown on the poster as well. I had to liaise with him to make sure everything is going well, but of course report back to my supervisor and she would make the final decisions.

I felt like I was put on the spot when I decided to intern with angelhands; especially because I am currently the only PR personnel in this organisation as of present.

I hope to get my hands into the social media side of things as well though, by helping angelhands with their Facebook and/or Twitter pages.

This is what I've accomplish so far and will keep you posted on what angelhands have got installed for me next. (:

<3 Deanna C.
13884271

The Fair Tradie Project Ball

Blog 2

The day of the Fair Tradie Project Ball arrived and there was so much to be done so everyone had to be at the South Perth Community Hall at 11:00 AM in order to set up. I had to help set up the tabels and chairs, arrange seating plans, create flower arrangements for the tables and help with the goodie bags.

At 6:00 PM we were debriefed on our roles for the night. Another girl and I were front of house and in charge of checking everyones names off at the door and informing them of where they were sitting. It soon became clear that it was going to be fairly difficult as the list of names was not in alphabetical order and many names were missing off the list. It took a little while to sort all the issues out but it was a great learning experience about what I would do differently next time. I did a lot of running around trying to find people's seats and figuring out table issues.

Once the night got underway I helped serve drinks and then Georgia the event manager asked me to model the auction items so people at the tables could see the items. I was not super keen as there was hundreds of people in the room but i worked up to courage to do it. I also had to go around and ask the guests who they thought was the best dressed for the night and who the best dancers were. At 12 PM the night was finished and we had to stay back to clean up and pack away everything. It was an extremely long day and there were a few bumps but it was a wonderful night and everyone seemed to really enjoy it.

In the end $15 000 was raised for FTP to build homes for orphaned children in Jinja Uganda which was short of the $30 000 that we hoped to raise but it was still a great result. I personally learned a lot through the process of preparing for the ball and how much work is required in organising everything especially when you work for a not for profit organisation and everything comes from donations.

Media Releases - What a Process! - Blog 2

Hi all,

It has been eight days now at the Heart Foundation and it certainly has been busy. The last few days I have been working alongside the media and communication manager to help promote the 2012 DoorKnock appeal. You may be familiar with this campaign; it entails an army of 120,000 volunteers (nationally) “Door-knocking” in order to raise 5 million dollars to help fund life saving research and promote community health.

The campaign begins in WA on the 3^rd of September and finishes on the 22^nd.

Last week I officially sent my first media release to a local community newspaper and it was a good experience. (I believe I have sent three or four now) I am glad I remembered what we were taught all those moons ago in the PR media techniques classes. It is surprising how your desk phone becomes an extension of your body, especially when calling journalists and gathering quotes from volunteers.

The whole process of sending out a media release can be quite time consuming as detailed below:

1)     Source a volunteer who is willing to interviewed and photographed for a local paper and has a personal connection with heart disease. (harder than it sounds)

2)     Interview them over the phone to generate quotes to incorporate within the release.

3)     Once typed, send the quotes back to the individual for approval, alongside a media exposure consent form.

4)     Call the local paper and find the appropriate journalist for the media release.

5)     Wait for the approval forms to come back, and then input them within the release.

6)     Send the completed media release to the journalist and hope it will be used to generate a story in the local newspaper.

That is roughly the process, however there is often a spanner thrown in the works somewhere along the lines.

Recently I was also lucky enough to sit in a PR meeting in West Perth within a firm named Devahasdin PR, regarding the ‘smarter than smoking campaign’ running this year. The meeting was conducted with a PR team who were certainly on the ball and very professional. It was great to escape the office for a little while and see how professional PR people conduct business behind closed doors.

If you anybody is interested in learning more about the DoorKnock Appeal or even donating!, Visit www.heartfoundation.org.au/doorknock

Thanks for reading, Miles