Uni and Internship coming to a close

Hello all,
So the semester has rapidly drawn to a close and with that so has my internship. My last days at Creating Communities have been seriously action packed though!

I was very excited to learn that a media release I had sent to the Post Newspaper was published in an article- they used pretty much all my wording so I was very pleased to see my work published.



One of the community development teams asked me to participate in the inaugural Markets at the Village at Wellard a PEET/CCA initiative. This meant waking up at 4am on my Sunday morning and going down to help at the market, my job was to follow the event running sheet and provide information to stall holders, help them set up and then also run the fruit and vegetable stall, at the conclusion of the day I helped to pack up and give people information on the next market day and also provide Creating Communities and PEET with feedback that people had given to me whilst I manned my stall.

After the success of the first round of staff photos I had to organise to get the photographer back for a second lot of individual staff photos for staff that missed the first round. This was certainly a lot easier the second time around!

As part of assisting Paula with her work I have been involved in updating and editing copy from the back end of the website. I was also delegated the job of doing quality control on the website making sure spacing and page layout was uniform throughout.

I was given the job of writing some staff biographies for the new website which basically consisted of getting different staff resumes and condensing the information into a small paragraph that would engage website readers.

Last week I wrote some more press releases for the website, on recent past events. They weren’t going to be sent out to media but were going to be archived on the news page on the website. This meant getting permission from clients to release media statements mentioning work that has been done in partnership. So some more valuable media release and phone practice!

I spent an entire day creating a comprehensive media database breaking down print, electronic, radio and television with further break down of print into business, real estate and fashion. There is still a bit of work to be done, this includes magazine publications but this can be added to over time and my work has definitely set the foundation. It was really handy to be able to go back through old pr assignments and use the media contacts I had already researched.

As I mentioned in my past blog I have been creating a conference database, this is an ongoing job and I do conference follow up research every week to see if there are any new conferences being announced which are of interest to Creating Communities and also to follow up with organisers to see if our directors can be put on judging or speaking roles.

The Creating Communities newsletter is going ahead at full steam! I have been chasing up ideas and writing articles for the e-blast and news page for the website. The topics which I have been following up and writing on are
o Community Economic Development Plans in Broome and Cairns
o Fly in/ Fly out Centre of Excellence research
o AMSRS- Australian Market and Social Research Society membership
o Melbourne office opening
o Website launch
o Parks and Leisure Award

So my time at Creating Communities has drawn to a close, I just want to acknowledge and thank my mentor Paula, who has consistently supported me and answered my many questions. I would also like to thank the Creating Communities directors Allan and Donna for giving me the opportunity to work for them and for giving me so many interesting projects.

I hope this experience has been a rewarding one for all of you as much as it has been for me. So this is it guys...end of our internships and end of uni....time to enter the 'real world'!

Wishing everyone all the very best!

Primrose

Over half way!

Hello all,
I hope everyone is still enjoying their placements as much as I am. I am over the half way mark now and have been really really busy.

As part of the complete rebrand of Creating Communities the company needed an updated group staff photo and individual shots for the new website- so I was delegated the job of finding a student photographer who wouldn’t be too expensive but would still produce a quality product. Luckily a good friend of mine happened to fit that exact profile- so I was hoping that all the amateur shots he had taken in the past would be practice enough to produce a quality outcome (I was a bit worried as one of the directors used to be a photographer- so I had to make sure everything ran very smoothly and the photographs were of a good quality!). Luckily everything turned out really great. And you can see the finished product above and below.



In my last blog I talked about the cover page of the new Creating Communities website going live, the first cover page is the public interface with online stakeholders and the four flash pages which the design team created has been really effective. With the cover page going live my supervisor, Paula, was keen to get the rest of the pages completed and gradually go live with the rest, so this has meant that I have been proof reading a lot of articles and website copy.

Creating Communities was part of an award winning team, along with property developer PEET, who won a national Parks and Leisure award for the Village at Wellard. This was very exciting for the team to receive this accolade so it was only fit that I write up a media release and send it to our local papers. This is always such a daunting task- you know that when you are a PR practitioner that you will be writing media releases, but when it gets down to writing your first ones it is quite daunting and I was seriously raking my brain trying to remember PR Media and PR Techniques! I was also surprised when my supervisor thought it was good- need to believe in my own PR abilities a little bit more- I am sure this first media release will be the first of many!

One of the jobs that I had to do after writing the media release was to actually get PEET and other partners to approve what I had written- I was also a bit scared that they wouldn’t like what I had written but after liaising with the client I was given the all clear.

The move into the Melbourne office which I have talked about in previous blogs is still moving full steam ahead!! This meant that the Melbourne director (who is currently working in the Perth office) was flown over to Melbourne to try and establish some contacts and possibly win some work (stakeholder management and networking!!). So my job was to refer back to the business plan with the ten year outlook, vision, mission, strategies and expertise to create a PowerPoint presentation to take to clients that sold our company and our expertise but also raise our brand profile. This meant writing up ideas and proofing more copy, the finished product looked really great!

As part of the ten year business plan Creating Communities Australia wants to become Creating Communities so that the business can expand globally without having to be location specific. One of the strategies to raise our profile locally, nationally and internationally is to get Creating Communities employees on judging panels for awards, speaking positions at conferences or as a last resort being delegates at conferences to create networking opportunities and to raise the Creating Communities brand profile. My part in this has been to develop a conference and award database, recording important up and coming conferences and awards that fit in with the Creating Communities strategic direction. From the database I was then required to start emailing organizers about judging, speaking or attending. One thing I had to remember when email people was that my emails had to be really perfect as my name and the company is attached to it so it had to be absolutely spot on!

In an effort to communicate with a broader audience Creating Communities is starting an internal newsletter. This newsletter will be emailed out in an e-blast to contacts on our database. I have been put in charge of this project and have so far been gathering ideas from fellow staff about possible news stories and brainstorming ideas and newsletter themes. As part of this I have mapped out an 18 month plan for the newsletter with possible themes and have tentatively set the themes for next three newsletters.

So to finish up, I have been doing heaps and heaps of really interesting work and it looks set to continue. Hope the rest of you are still enjoying your placements too!

Primrose

Busy busy busy!!

Hello all,
Just a quick explanation as two why I am making two consecutive posts- I have been having trouble posting my blog so I had them saved in a word document until I worked out how to post them- So now I have worked it out- here is my second reflective blog!

So I have now been at CCA for 10 days and Linc for 5 days! Very exciting...but also keeping me very busy!

At CCA I have continued my involvement in the business development side of the company and the expansion into Melbourne- at times this has been boring work, for example entering names and addresses, business names etc from the company directors business cards into the Melbourne contacts database. On the flip side exciting work has included researching into different areas and aspects of Melbourne and presenting my ideas to my superiors and having them take my ideas and comments on board.

Last week I was really pleased when a new administration assistant was taken on board and I was able to hand over the Melbourne database work to her- however this process was also very surreal as I had to create a brief for the new assistant and she would be answering to me if she had any questions.

A lot of time an effort has been spent on the new website for CCA- and I can now reveal to you the before and afters- the website that I have contributed to will be launched and go live on Friday 17th of September.












On the left is a screen shot of the old website and on the right a screen shot of the new website, as you can see they are vastly different- and the new website incorporates concepts and ideas outlined in the 10 year business plan.

At Linc I have also been very busy. Some of the jobs I have been undertaking here include writing media releases for clients that recently won awards, proofing newsletters before they are released, helping Amanda and Gemma with an auction event at Churchlands Green- this has meant ringing hire societies, portaloos and marquee operators for quotes. To do this job properly and efficiently I had to be briefed on the client and the event- taking away the information I had and working to the budget and deadline.

Hope everyone is still enjoying their internships!

2 placements and 2little time!

Hello everyone,
A little introduction; my name is Primrose McKenzie, and I am in my final semester studying a double degree in Social Science and Commerce majoring in politics/international relations and public relations. So here we are finishing my last core units before graduating...including PR 393!!

As the title of my blog suggests I am actually doing two placements, this came about because I was feeling the pressure to get a placement and two places seemed really great, so now I am doing two! (Absolutely crazy I know!). The one I will be writing my report about and completing the 20 days before the end of semester is Creating Communities Australia- where I currently work two days a week. Check out this link to their website for more info:

The other work place I am currently undertaking work experience is Linc Intergrated- I only do one day a week here, but will hopefully pick up more when the other intern from ECU finishes hers. Have a look at this link for more information about this company:

A little bit of background information on Creating Communities Australia (CCA): CCA has worked with local government authorities (LGAs), mining companies and private sector developers for more than a decade, forging partnerships to ensure sustainable project outcomes that minimise social costs and maximise community gains. So basically they do a lot of community relations work and also have social planners, community development officers and research officers to help out with this work.

So where do i fit in to the fabric which makes up CCA- my job title is Communications and Marketing Assistant and I answer to the Marketing and Communications Director- Paula. So far I have done 6 days at CCA and 3 days at Linc, so its time to write about what i have been doing these last three weeks!

At CCA I have been involved with business development mostly as the company is looking to open an office in Melbourne. I love Melbourne so doing research about a city I love has come very easily to me- it also includes media monitoring and evaluating problems currently being experienced in Melbourne (this means analytical skills learnt at uni have been put into practice big time!) I have been researching and creating databases of contacts in Melbourne including

• Competitors
• Existing customers from Perth that have offices or links to Melbourne
• Partnership organisations- that is researching into organisations that CCA could possibly build partnerships with or obtain membership too ie. UN habitat, industry associations such as the UDIA and the Commonwealth Association of Planners (CAP)
• New contacts- which include: building industry, government and property developers

I have also been helping to develop a new website at CCA which has meant reading the recently published 10 years business plan and matching these concepts to website designs- in doing this I have been able to employ PR concepts such as corporate branding to the jobs I have been assigned. Working on the website has meant I was looking for appropriate images to be used on the website from Corbis and Getty images that matched the brief I was given and also what I had read in the 10 year business plan.

So far at CCA I have really enjoyed working with my supervisor who has extensive experience in her field and always has time for my million and one questions, she has also genuinely listened to my opinions and ideas.

So on to what work I have been doing at Linc- I have also been very busy at Linc, as they are an integrated marketing/advertising/public relations/ design etc company. I was very nervous on my first day- but I was thrown in the deep end, meeting a client and brainstorming ideas on how to generate some media coverage and achieve specific outcomes outlined by the client in the meeting. This really put skills and theories learnt at uni to the test- and it also put my creativity and ability to think outside the box to the test.

So far my duties at Linc have included media monitoring, proof reading a publication before it was sent out on behalf of the client, calling clients and potential clients and confirming the contact on the database was in fact still working for the organisation in the position identified on the database and if not to update the database with new information. I also worked on a breakfast event to attract new clients to Linc- this is going to be a breakfast that will teach clients and potential clients about new media.

So as you can tell I am doing quite a lot at the moment, however I am really enjoying putting the theory into practice. Hope everyone else is enjoying their placements too!