An end to a terrific few months

Today I completed my final day of work experience at City of Joondalup and the time has really flown by, I can’t believe it has already come to an end. It feels like the time I’ve spent here has been so brief yet so valuable in teaching me about the industry I’m about to enter in the following year.

I have left City of Joondalup with a sound knowledge of how to write goals and strategies for a public relations plan, a social media strategy, media releases and columns for City publications.

The highlights of my placement were;

-       Researching potential names for one of the City of Joondalup staff meeting rooms and having one of my own suggestions be submitted to the Mayor for consideration.

-       Researching how other local governments and businesses celebrate NAIDOC Week and making suggestions for what the City can do to increase attendance and get the Joondalup community more involved in next years events.

-       Putting years of writing media releases and advertising material into practise by writing to promote Joondalup events and the city itself for City of Joondalup publications and paid newspaper advertisements

-       Learning about the City’s social media strategies and what they are doing to develop their online presence and become more interactive.

-       Performing competitor analysis’s for the City to see how other governments brand themselves and how effective this is, to determine whether any improvements could be made to Joondalups branding to better communicate key messages to the public.

I learnt a great deal over the past months and what I learnt in the workplace I will take with me when I get my first job in public relations. This experience has given me the confidence I could never get from the classroom.

Not only did I learn a lot when I was working on my own, I also learnt that there are many days in the world of PR where things do not go according to plan! On my last day the City’s Rates Draw was being held that night, where the City gives out prizes to residents that have paid their rates ahead of time as a way to reward ratepayers and encourage people to make their payments early. This saw many of us in the office come together in a rush to ensure everything was ready for the night, right down to decorations for the venue and nametags!

It’s been a great experience and I’m a little sad to leave, but now I’m more excited than ever to begin my own journey in the world of PR! Thanks for reading everybody.

Social media at Craigie Leisure Centre

Today I completed my final day of work experience at Craigie Leisure Centre and now only have one week remaining at the City of Joondalup before I finish my entire work placement experience for the semester. Helping out over the last couple of weeks at Craigie has been a great experience. The marketing and public relations activities are all based around promoting sports and leisure so there are always plenty of exciting things happening. I have also come in at a great time as Craigie is in the middle of implementing a lot of new changes to their branding and are updating the ways they use certain communication channels to reach the public.

Craigie has decided to update their website and develop more of an online presence in order to increase awareness about the centre as well as to build up their brand image in the eyes of the public.

In order to do this they are undertaking a large amount of research to see how customers are currently receiving information about the sports programs and classes offered by the center as well as how customers wish to receive such information. Craigie was able to collate this information by including the two questions at the top of enrolment forms that customers filled out to enrol in any group fitness class, to enrol in swimming school as well as booking forms for children’s swimming pool parties.

I spent a large portion of the day tallying up responses, entering them into an excel chart and creating graphs to view results.

Results showed that a majority of people had heard about programs through flyers in the center, the website and through friends (word of mouth). People said that their preferred method of hearing about upcoming events and new classes was through email or SMS.

After this I had a discussion with Rochelle, the head of the marketing team at Craigie who told me about their plans to revamp the company website so that it is more interactive and informative.

Craigie also uses Facebook to reach the public that they are aiming to update more often with photographs, status updates and information about upcoming events. While working on research into the publics preferred communication methods, they achieved one of their key performance indicators relating to the number of interactions they received on their Facebook page. It was interesting to hear key performance indicators being discussed within the context of a real company and realising that people working in public relations and marketing actually apply them to their day to day work. It was great to see that choosing key performance indicators to measure the success of strategies is not just a university exercise but something that we will actually be using in the workforce.

Overall I really enjoyed my time at Craigie. I spent most of my time working on analysing ways that Craigie can improve communication with their current customers and how they can improve their online profile to gain new customers. The leisure centre put a lot of effort into background research before making any changes and it was very interesting to be a part of this.

Next week will be my last post, after I complete my last day back at City of Joondalup on Monday, where I will summarise everything I learnt there. 

First weeks at the City of Joondalup

Hello everyone, 

This is my first blog post written after completing four days at my placement within the Marketing Department at the City of Joondalup. So far I have been going in every Monday, however will be beginning to go in several times a week as the semester progresses and as we get closer to some of the events they hold.

At City of Joondalup public relations is incorporated into their relatively small marketing department, specifically focused on by the media advisor. As a result of this I was exposed to different activities some more marketing orientated and some more public relations based. The variety kept things interesting and I have definitely learnt a lot.

So far I have had a great experience here with everybody being extremely friendly and more than happy to help me on things I am unsure about as well as having me sit and work with them to get a better understanding of each of their roles within the department and the jobs they carry out on a day to day basis.

Being a local government, the City of Joondalup hosts a lot of corporate events, but it also hosts plenty of community based events where they are currently really focused on getting more awareness and increasing attendance.

Because of this I have been assisting with a lot of the work developing advertisements, fliers, booklets and signs to be distributed to the public before events including the Joondalup Festival, Joondalup Esteddford, Little Feet Festival and more.

I have been asked to do a competitor analysis for some of these events. Looking at the websites run by other local governments and seeing how events are run and what type of advertising is used. I am then asked to make any suggestions for things that City of Joondalup could do for upcoming events or events they have next year.

I did a lot of this for NAIDOC Week, the National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee. This is celebrated by many local governments and companies around Australia every year and City of Joondalup always holds an opening ceremony and several community activities. I was asked to research and come up with ways that the City can increase attendance and encourage more of the public to attend. In the past they have found that the activities are mainly attended by City employees which the marketing department wants to change by increasing awareness.

So far I have had a great time in my placement and look forward to what I’ll be learning in the weeks to come!

The monumental mail merge

Hi everyone,

I am now at the halfway mark of my placement at the City of Joondalup, how fast is the time going?

I’ve seen and learnt about a lot of cool things so far, as well as getting a lot of practical tips for my PR toolbox. If I were to single out one of the most useful tools I’ve learnt along the way I’d have to say at the top of my “handy things to know” list is the incredible Mail Merge on word. I’m not sure if any of you reading my blog has heard of it (or used it) but it’s definitely a tool I’ll be adding to my skill kit and probably my resume!

For those of you who don’t know what Mail Merge is, I’ll explain it. It’s a function on Microsoft Word under the Mailings tab which allows you to enter multiple details into one document and then send those to different people with their own personal details on it. For example, if you were sending 500 invitations and wanted to include the invitees name on the invite you would only need to do one invitation, enter a field i.e. and then link that document to your database list (on excel). The application will make 500 individualised invitations. It doesn’t only work for invites either; it also works for table place cards, letters, labels and envelopes (basically anything).

While I was spending some time with the Civic Functions Officer during my placement last week she mentioned mail merge and couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard of it. It’s a very integral part of her event planning process, because she has a very full role with all of the civic function that she organises. Some of the functions include Australian Citizenship ceremonies, dinners for sporting/recreational/community clubs in the area and corporate functions. So you could image that she doesn’t have the time to individually type the names onto the amount of invitations she sends out.

I was amazed when she showed me what mail merge was and how easy it was to use- all those hours of individually addressing letters and envelopes could have been minutes. This is one “tip of the trade” that should be taught during the PR techniques unit.

I thought I would share this golden piece of information with you in case no one else had heard of it as well. It’s definitely something you should use if you are doing any events. If you are going to play around with it, or want to learn more, I’ve found this tutorial pretty helpful. I hope you all benefit from this knowledge as much as I did.

Katie.

My first days at the City of Joondalup

Hi everyone, I’m Katie and I’m six days into my PR 393 placement at the City of Joondalup. I’ve been working predominantly with the media advisor of the City so far and it has been a real learning experience. I’ve had the opportunity to write media releases, and see the end product of those as actual articles in the newspaper. I’ve also written speeches for councillors and have learnt a lot about the processes of dealing with the media.

The first thing everyone said as I was introduced around the office on my starting day at the City was “so you’re going to be helping Mark create some spin hey?” (Mark is my supervisor) If anything, these words from the rest of the marketing and governance department really showed how PR is viewed within the organisation.

This view of PR, however, is not what I’m going to blog about on this occasion. I want to talk about the media and using them for reaching the City of Joondalup’s key stakeholders, City of Joondalup residents. Being a local government, the City of Joondalup receives a lot of negative publicity for things that are often out of their control or just by people who have had a bad experience with the council. A lot of this negative publicity gets reported in the Joondalup Times and the Joondalup Weekender, the local Community newspapers which are delivered to all the residents of the City of Joondalup, so it’s important to get positive stories about what the City does in there as often as possible.

Mark was once a journalist and manager for the Community Newspaper group and he has highlighted for me the importance of keeping a good relationship between yourself and the journalists of your most used media outlets. (Just as a sidenote, Mark also said he had to rebuild a lot of his friendships with journalists when he moved from journalism to PR because, for the journalists, he lost his credibility. This really emphasizes what we’ve been told during our PR degrees that journalists and PR professionals don’t get along!). By having a good relationship with important media outlets it makes it a lot easier for you when there is a big issue that is happening and your organisation needs to comment or get your side of the story in the media, it doesn’t mean, however, that the story will have the desired end result.

To illustrate this I’m going to use an example of something that occurred in my first days at the City. The local government reporter for The West Australian contacted Mark about local government spending on graffiti. The beauty of having a good relationship with journalists, or close friends in the industry in Mark’s case, is that they allow you to comment or get in on certain issues that are being reported on. The questions that were asked included things like how much was spent on the cleaning up of graffiti (a number that has been very high in previous years for the City of Joondalup), and how prominent it was in the area. Different departments needed to be contacted for the figures and out own positive take on the matter needed to be included, that the City’s spending has decreased by hundreds of thousands because of all the positive programs to prevent it.

The next day, as the number one morning duty came about- media monitoring- we opened the West to see how the story ran. It was gut-wrenching to see that the term “City of Joondalup” was not included once in the whole article. Our figures were used, though, along with our preventative measures.

There is only one thing to do when you are not happy with how a story has run, according to my supervisor, and that is to get in touch with the journalist and to ask why this has happened. So we got in touch and politely enquired as to why the story had run this way. The answer was that the editor wanted to story to reflect councils who were spending more money on removal rather than decreasing numbers. Which made a lot of sense when it was explained and plus it made us feel better that there wasn’t a negative story on us in the state paper. The CEO was pleased about this for much the same reason.

I guess what the lesson was, is that no matter how good your relationship is with the journalist, you’re not always going to get your way because the media is an uncontrolled form of communication. All you can be thankful for is that you’re not included in any negative issues.

I am looking forward to last three-quarters of my internship at the City of Joondalup and reading all about everyone else’s experiences.

Katie Richards.