The PR Journeyman: Ready, Set, Go!

Greetings fellow students!

For those who don't know me, my name is Blade Shaw and I'm currently in my final year of a Bachelor of Commerce - majoring in Public Relations. For a little insight to my background, I've had some previous experience acting within PR/Communications roles in two different businesses - Morris Computers and Pro Used Pty Ltd, both which are heavily interlinked with the IT industry.

As a student, I've just come off 2 years running on the Public Relations Student Chapter serving as both Secretary and Vice President respectively over 2011/2012. It was my decision at the end of the year to step down and concentrate on my final year, and PR Professional Practice was one of the many units I knew would require my full attention.

Over the University break, as I'm sure most of us did - I looked long and hard for an internship which I thought would best fit my interests, and contacted a number of organisations respectively. Luckily, I was contacted by Volunteering WA - who were very forthcoming and were quite interested in getting me on board after our initial contact.

Before I commenced my placement, I went into the offices and sat down with Felicity Stevens who is the IT Support Officer at VWA - and also a member of the services team of which I'm currently working as a part of. Our meeting went quite well, and after she had guided me through a run-down of the tasks that the service team required me to perform, and that they thought would best suit my skill set.

I started on the 25th of March, and immediately was set to task learning the ins and outs of the organisation so that I would have a significant amount of background knowledge to work off. My first thoughts immediately alerted me to start jotting down ideas in regards to social media, website content, promotional ideas - whatever appeared not to be on offer through their current communications, I was looking to establish a strategy to create it or improve upon their existing practices.

So far, I've still been trying to find my feet at the end of my second week - however it appears I'm slowly beginning to pick up some pretty good momentum, and VWA have been quite open to allowing me to take a great deal of creative licence with the ideas I have for their organisation. At the start of next week, I will be sending out a brief to a number of different University clubs regarding an exciting new service that VWA will be offering.

I will also be conducting some filming for their YouTube channel, documenting some of the exciting new features of their upcoming service.It's been my luck that I have been blessed with a number of very talented personal contacts at my disposal, and will be joined by Zak Norris - a Murdoch Screen Product student who recently was awarded 1st place in Reach Out's Film Crew competition. His winning video can be found on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=aJWE42n-LZ0

Thanks everyone for reading my first post, I'm really glad to have been able to share some insight into my first week at the Volunteering WA office. Please continue to check back with my blog entries, as I continue to document my experiences over the course of my placement.

Blade Shaw
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