The attempt to create relationships

Creating relationships with those in the community is essential especially for a non-for-profit organisation. Communicare is holding National Families Week from May 13th- 21st this year. National Families Week, is about helping children understand how important family is and how working together as a family will allow them to live a healthier lifestyle. 

Not many people in the community seem to know about National Family Week, so this week my task was to ring up different IGAs to see if they wanted to partner with us to get the word out there about the event. Communicare was going to provide everything like colouring and drawing competitions as well as posters for promotions (because for a non-for-profit, any free type promotion is positive), all that was needed was the space to place the items. 

In my several years as a PR students and doing work placements, ringing organisations is now something that seems to get simpler, if you follow the steps which is introduce yourself, the organisation and explain why you are ringing. I followed this procedure when calling the first IGA and success, they agreed to lend us their space to promote National Families Week, Upon that everything seemed downhill, everyone had a different reason such as, they did not have any space, they do not work with local communities, their managers were overseas etc and couldn't help. As time went on, and the ringing continued, I had another three IGAs agree to helping Communicare out with National Families Week. 

Ringing up the different IGAs, most of the managers and supervisors I spoke too, were nice and easy and speak too, whilst some were intimidating, which meant I had to change my approach on how I explained why I was ringing. 

Though at times intimidating, it was a challenge and none the less it was research for Communicare and the marketing and media team, as we found out why the different IGAs could not help us along with the ones that could. 

Till next time :)

Task: Working as a PR trainee

The world of Public relations is not limited only to media releases as I previously talked about, that is publishing articles. It has other less enjoyable task like making contact list which is very long and tiring as we need to search but also call people so as to update the list. However it is not only boring but it can be a good to learn how to speak to people and send the right messages. Sometimes it is a thin line between having a successful campaign and a failure, as the better you know how to talk to people, the more you can do and appealing you can be. I am also making calls to have sponsorships for the next campaign that i am working on to make fund-raising for PILS hotline; Sida Info Maurice.


On my second week of work, some other task apart from making calls is to ensure that press clippings are well scanned and organised in order so as to make it easier to access. This is a slow but important task as if done regularly it won't become a hard task as it won't be piled up. The articles are kept in folders Date and months and each files scanned are classified by name-mediaoutlet-subject-date. It is very important so as to make it easier

I also wrote the sponsorship mails to send to the companies who can donate to make the next fundraising campaign a success. This is a process that takes time and a lot of patience. It can be very difficult when dealing with reluctant people who keeps on postponing your calls or ask you to call later. It is very reward when concluded for sponsors.