Corporate Collective- Dining With the Big Cheese

Day One of the Fremantle Dockers internship; and what a day it was. Coincidently on my first week of placement it so happened to be one of the Dockers largest home games of the year, the Starlight Children Foundation Purple Haze game (Fremantle vs. Essendon). For the past 11 years the Fremantle Dockers have had a partnership with The Starlight Children’s Foundation and in honour of this partnership host a home game dedicated to raising funds for the foundation and its worthy cause. Subsequently the Dockers host a pre game charity auction lunch involving all of the associated Dockers sponsors (Big Cheese) as well a few special individuals who have previously and continue to support both the Dockers and Starlight.

So back to my first day.. Waking up like a kid on Christmas I jumped out of bed and made sure I was ready for an action packed day with my Coordinator. Having been informed the night before that we were hosting a function I spent the morning pondering over breakfast what kind of function it would be. Again by coincidence the day before it had been announced that legendary Essendon coach James Hird had been accused of partaking in drug use, how very scandalous! Not such good news for Essendon, however potentially brilliant news for the Fremantle Dockers Marketing and PR team.

Thinking back to my essential PR planning tools I immediately came to see the good and bad of the situation. A wise lecturer once told me that an issue that arises that may at first seem potentially damaging to your organisation, however if interpreted correctly could be utilised to a fantastic competitive advantage. So number one first lesson in media damage control; do not associate yourself with another’s problems when it is not directly connected to your organisation. Given we as the Events/ Marketing department would be directly communicating with the MC and media trained players to attend the event it was to be made very clear that absolutely no comments would be made in regards to the Essendon incident.  

Now you can guess at why we were told to disassociate ourselves from Essendon’s unfortunate series of events. Do not make comment, stay out of the frenzied media debate, simple. However, the other side of the story is not so clear. How does Essendon’s woes work at a competitive advantage for Fremantle? In terms of Marketing and PR function the media frenzied whipped up by national and state would direct what was predicted to be one of the highest rating games in the Southern Hemisphere apart from the Grand Final of course- In other words the whole of Australia would be watching the game on Friday anticipating what James Hirds’ next move would be. Would he crack under the pressure or would he rise to the occasion?

But I digress, back to the pre-game function. All and all the function was a huge success. A charity auction was held with all proceeds going to the Starlight Foundation and a very worthy cause. Players auctioned the items with a special mention going out to Chris Mayne, the auctioneer extraordinaire! Our MC was very entertaining keeping up the witty banter throughout the two hours that the function was held for and I must say the food was delicious once I figured out it was actually ok to be the intern and eat just like the other guests, phew! And finally you would be pleased to know that no mention of the Essendon debacle left our MC’s lips. Well maybe just once, but that can be our little secret right?! 

On a bit of a sour note Essendon defeated the Dockers, so yes James Hird held up quite well in fact. Oh well you can’t win them all, great game I say! 

One of the hardest things I have ever had to do...

So I don’t know if anyone read my blog from Friday about my time at the Shenton Park Dogs’ Refuge supervising a photo shoot for the corporate volunteering day… If you didn’t you might want to read it before I go on…because it’s amazing how much can change in 24 hours.

So on Friday I was relishing the fact that the story I wrote a media release for and supervised a photo shoot for, made page 3 of the The Post newspaper. When my supervisor told me this news I was absolutely thrilled and she sent me a copy of it, though because I was at university I just gave it a quick glance and moved on.

Because I was the one who wrote the media release for the story, I was also the person who contacted and did interviews with all those involved in the volunteering day, including the husband and wife who donated the $10,000 worth of turf for the refuge. This was all so that I could write up a media release to be sent to journalists who may want to write the story in their newspaper.

To my dismay however, on Saturday I received a text message from the wife who donated the turf saying she was disappointed because some of the facts of the story were wrong. I then told her to give me five minutes so that I could read over the story and then give her a call. I read it and realised that she was correct, a lot of the facts did actually get mixed up. It wasn’t anything too bad just a few simple errors but still it seemed to mean a lot to her so I gave her a call and said I would try and see what I could do.

I started to panic a little because I felt terrible and went over the media release I sent out to the journalists and realised that no, all of my facts were correct and the error was actually on behalf of the journalist who wrote the story- who was actually my second year journalism tutor.

The first thing I wanted to do was ring up my previous tutor David Cohen and say: “Remember all those times you told us to always check the facts and be accurate with whatever we are reporting? Well ha! You made errors in your story so there!”  Obviously my brain got the better of me and I didn’t, and decided to contact my supervisor to ask her what to do.

So I did this and she explained to me that the errors were only really minor and the story still put the husband and wife who donated the turf in a really positive light, and it was really great media coverage for the dogs’ home. She then went on to explain to me how the journalists and newspaper are actually doing us a favour by putting our story into the paper, and especially on page 3 because it really is free advertisement for both the refuge and also the turf company. She also said how asking for an apology might jeopardise the already really stable relationship our consultancy has with The Post newspaper and said if we were to criticize them they may not put our stories in at all in the future.

Because The Post comes out on Friday, all journalists must file their stories by 12:30pm on Thursday. As we did the photo shoot on Thursday at 11:30 the journalist only had little time to go back and file it and so this is where the errors must have occurred.

I thought about all of this and knew she was right. Although I felt terrible for the wife, at the end of the day it was a really great story and gave our client some really good media coverage. I now just had to ring the wife and try and explain this to her in the nicest possible way.

My supervisor Ruth helped me come up with some phrases because frankly I was a little bit scared of ‘getting my head bitten off’ in case the wife was still unhappy. I really wanted to say to my supervisor “No can’t you do it? She’ll listen to you more” but then I thought to myself “No, if I want to show to Ruth I can handle crisis situations and act calm then this is something I have to do myself”. And so I did.

I planned out everything I was going to say on a piece of paper and gave the wife a call. I told her I understood her and said it was really unfortunate but explained to her how well the story did by getting in a paper and on page three as well and how positive the article talked of her and her husband and that this was the most important thing to focus on here. At the end of the day, regardless of the few mistakes the article made, it publicised the refuge in a really positive way and also showed of the kind hearts of these generous people who I said are an inspiration to everyone.

This whole situation taught me that journalists are very time constrained, and although these situations aren’t our fault, there is nothing we can really do about them because yes, they are doing us public relations professionals a favour by helping us put our clients’ articles in their newspapers.

It also taught me of the important relationships public relations practitioners have with journalists. Without journalists there is essentially no media coverage for our clients and hence no publicity for their respective companies. Although journalists may at times get information and facts wrong it is always best to keep them on your good side because you never know when you will need them next. This was definitely a lesson learnt for me and even though it was unfortunate I am really glad it happened because I will know for next time what to do and how to calmly handle situations such as this.