Stakeholder Relations 101

Hello There,

So in my previous post about my daily tasks as a Public Relations intern, I highlighted on the role of Public Relations personnel as communicators and mediators between an organization and its publics or stakeholders. It is safe to say that this role is the most important one as although all the individual tasks I encountered during my internship were vast and varied, they all collectively led back to serving this specific role.

The most common execution of this role can be seen when looking at how an organization relates to its community or the general public. During my internship, this manifested itself as the relationship between the Ministry of Energy and Minerals and the general Tanzanian public. As a Public Relations practitioner working for the Ministry, my primary role was to communicate important information to and fro the two parties. 

On one hand, this was done through the media releases that I would write on behalf of the Ministry, that would be relayed to the public through the media. Inversely, by summarizing the daily mentions of the Ministry and briefing it to the Ministry's officials and staff, I was communicating to the Ministry what was being said about it in the public. Furthermore, the media releases were put on the Ministry's official website and in its weekly news bulletin that is open to the public, to reach a wider audience, and so relay information to more people.  

Another important stakeholder relationship to highlight is that of the Ministry and its staff. Internal communications was executed through sending daily media briefs to all the Ministry's staff and not just the officials alone. This way, they were able to know the general news surrounding the Ministry, even with things they may not have been directly involved in. Similarly each week, a news bulletin highlighting the Ministry's latest happenings, including all the in-house media releases would be published and posted in all the Ministry's notice boards and emailed to all the staff and so this is serves as another way to keep the staff aware of the happenings of the organization they work for.

A new relationship I got to explore however, is that between the government and its partners; financial and otherwise. For the second half of my internship I was put in a team in charge of preparing an implementation report (more on this in my next post) on behalf of the Ministry to be submitted to one of its financial partners. Again, this is an example of the vital exchange of information between the organization and one of its stakeholders managed or facilitated by Public Relations personnel. 

Lastly but definitely not least, it is important to note the Ministry's relationship with the media. The Public Relations department was in charge of contacting all the media in case of any events as well as sending media releases to the media for publication, so once again we see that Public Relations people are responsible for maintaining and facilitating these relationships.

It was really interesting seeing a concept learnt in class play out in real life.

I hope this was an interesting read.

Until next time.

Latifah Mzee Hamis Salim Boma
17223946/ 7E3A1749

Curtin University, Sarawak Malaysia

A lil' bit of this and a lil' bit of that and realisations!

At Sunsets there is no distinguished PR team, rather it seems to intertwine with the marketing and events management. This is interesting to experience as I am able to experience a bit of PR, marketing and events management all in one! As Sunsets is such a small team environment with only a handful of full time employees,  I have also been lucky enough to work with a range of people in both junior and senior roles and learn from them immensely.

Some of the tasks that I have been given over the past couple of weeks have dealt with issue management, stakeholder relations and media relations. I was delegated the task that I think every PR intern is asked of media monitoring. Although a tedious task it is also probably one of the most critical. It involves monitoring press; online and print publications of sunset related media, which are collected, dated, scanned and stored for future references. Also, looking at Sunsets social media and blog postings or more formally known as 'buzz monitoring' to see what people are talking about sunsets and how they are using Sunsets social media. Overall, Sunsets uses media monitoring to stay on track of what media they are being promoted through, what is being said about them, what is trending, their competitors and staying on top of media news.

Another task that I embarked on was a research and write out responses for the Fremantle Business Awards 2013, which Sunset Events were entering themselves into. This was an important task and my grammar and spelling had to be impeccable. I learnt a lot more about the company while writing the report out and was surprised that my supervisor, Madi was extremely impressed with the written work and left it as it was before sending it off. Job well done for myself I say and a small confidence booster in writing business documents for the future.

After reading several blog posts from other students placement positions, I have come to realise even though, I have been given a great opportunity at Sunsets I don't believe I am experiencing everything that I want to. One task I would of loved to have been able to do is write media releases, so that I could get feedback on what I need to improve on as I feel media releases are a major part of public relations that really needs to be practised continuously. However my time at Sunsets so far, has made me realise that events management and especially in such a small team is not where I want to be in a future career. I think that rather, I would be more suited to somewhere more corporate, in a larger team, dealing with clients that I can interact with!

Until next time..

Ella

Who are your stakeholders?

Hi everyone!

I can't believe I only have two weeks left of my work placement, the time really does fly by!

Just a quick recap for those who don't know, I am currently undertaking my work experience at St John of God Murdoch hospital (SJGMH) in their Marketing and Community Relations department.

Since I've started I have met some amazing people, including the four lovely ladies who I have worked quite closely with: Kat, Community Relations Coordination; Jody, Marketing Coordinator; Nicola, Events Coordinator; and Lizzie, Public Relations Coordinator.

As you can see the roles are quite set in the department and as an intern I was able to stick my foot into each pond and gain experience in each facet of the department.

In this post I will be talking about stakeholder management and what I have learnt since coming on at SJGMH.

Stakeholder management at SJGMH falls mostly under Kat's role as Community Relations Coordinator. Being a private hospital our primary stakeholders are patients and future patients, doctors and allied health professionals, and our employees (which I will be discussing).

One of the ways SJGMH engages with its employees is through a Caregiver Exchange, a two-way monthly meeting with caregiver representatives from each ward who come together to discuss ideas and issues relevant to their roles at SGJMH.

What I found really interesting about the Caregiver Exchange is that there are members of executive management present so employees can give their ideas/opinions on various SJGMH initiatives straight to management. I can't think of many organisations that have these types of meetings on a regular basis.

Once the topic of the meeting has been discussed and the ideas collated, Kat produces a paper on her recommendations going forward and that is presented to all the executive directors for consideration and approval. In other words this exchange is a forum for employees to contribute their ideas of how to improve SJGMH, and to also be kept up to date about what is happening around the hospital.

Another interesting way SJGMH encourages feedback is through an initiative known as  "Ask Executive". "Ask Executive" is where caregivers can email the executive questions they want answered without having to speak to someone directly. All the questions are compiled once a month, answered and available both on the intranet and on the "Ask Executive" noticeboard in the employee lunch room. This form of two way communication allows employees to give feedback, address concerns or even praise the work of their fellow colleagues and is extremely popular if you consider how many questions get sent in.

Though I have only brushed on some of the ways SJGMH engages one of their primary stakeholders it has reinforced the importance of two way communication when it comes to stakeholder management.

I am extremely keen to see some of the changes that are happening as a direct result of discussion at the Caregiver Exchange and through suggestions sent to "Ask Executive".

Until next time!

PRintern.

Underestimating the importance of good internal communication between employees

Corporate Sports Australia is a very small office. There would not be more than 15 full time staff squeezed into one floor of offices above bar 1907 – and a lot of the staff don’t even have an office. About 6 of them (plus the interns) work from adjoining cubicles.

In such a small office , when you are constantly within a metres distance from another colleague, you would think it would be easy to maintain good internal communication. Apparently it’s not.

During my 10 weeks at CSA I heard a few of the employees mention how bad internal communication was within the organisation and how much better it had been in previous years. As an intern I imagine I did not experience the full extent of where it was lacking, especially as I had no idea of what ‘good internal comms’ looked like.  

While there were 15 staff in the office, only five of these were really involved with the City to Surf. And despite them being in constant contact with each other (where it was essential to the management of the event) there seemed to be a lack of general support.

Over the course of my internship a few instances gave me an indication of just how bad there communication was – and it really impacted my view of the organisation as a place of work and my relationships with senior staff – which in turn affected my attitude to work and possibly my work ethic.

About 2 day before ‘event day’ i’d received no information on what I’d be doing at the City to Surf – so I assumed I would be assisting in the media tent with the majority of the interns. Nope. On the Friday before the City to Surf (Sunday) myself and another intern were walking down to a press conference when she said, ‘hey congratulations on getting the stage manager role for Sunday.’ Stage manager? I had no idea this role existed nor had my boss mentioned it to me. Ever.

Later that day, i was ‘briefed’ on the role by the intern. Having been put in this role at such late notice, made it feel as if I were simply thrown in there as an afterthought. The fact that my boss had not bothered to tell me herself made it feel like a really insignificant job – which was reinforced by being briefed by an intern. Having now fulfilled this role I know one thing:

There was A LOT of information that no one bothered to tell me.

Funnily enough, my next task was to create a formal brief for the next intern who would be assigned the role of stage manager. How nice for them.

Following event day (Monday was one of my normal office days) I was ready to head in when I got a message from another intern making sure I knew we were not needed in the office until lunch time. Thankfully I got her message before I left, because all the senior staff had neglected to share this information with me.

On my last day of interning I spent 5 hours by myself in the office sifting through stats. The other staff had not bothered to mention they would all be out of the office until the afternoon.

These do seem like quite petty examples of bad internal comms and as an intern I never expected to be treated on the same level as senior staff, but as a result, it really changed my impression of the organisation and the people I was working with.

Until next time (hopefully with less whingeing)

Alanna

A fly on the wall at staff meetings

Staff weekly meetings may sound boring to some but this is where I have learnt some of the most valuable things about PR practice while interning at the PMH Foundation. Monday morning meetings have given me a broader perspective and greater insight into the organisation’s ethos, team dynamics and values. They have also brought to the surface many issues, ideas and concerns that play a part in bringing the team closer together and more in tune with each other and the vision and mission of the organisation. I have had time to think over a lot of different things that have come up in the meetings and in broad terms (so some information remains confidential) I wanted to outline some of the PR theory I have seen being used in practice.

Communication and Conflict Resolution - Employee Relations

At a staff meeting one person raised the concern that something had caused a shift in the team dynamic. Instead of feeling a sense of teamwork this particular thing had caused a sense of competition to overwhelm the way people went about their work. I thought this was an interesting point raised and as a team they felt they had to step back and assess whether this concern was affecting the organisation as a whole. The matter was fixed fairly easily because the meeting allowed people to voice their opinions and find a solution that suited everyone and bring things back to the values of the organisation. I think this was an example of good employee relations at the PMH Foundation and showed good communication within and across its teams of people. Staff are able to inform each other of important announcements and keep them updated with new developments during weekly meetings and through an email system. Informal things like ANZAC cookie competitions, nachos and pizza days are also lovely lunchtime ideas that build community and a sense of goodwill among co-workers. According to PR theory we have learned, service and quality are built through loyal and motivated employees. I think the relationships and communication developed in a mix of formal and informal ways are a key part to achieving this (I found this online tutorial had some pretty interesting things to say on this and many other aspects of PR if you are interested http://www.edvencomm.net/pr.pdf ).

Public Awareness - Marketing in PR

In my last staff meeting we discussed one of the main issues the Foundation is facing, which I outlined in my first blog post. Basically, there is continual confusion and lack of public awareness of the separate identity of the hospital and the Foundation. In addressing this concern, the marketing and communications team came up with a variety of new strategies to raise public awareness, manage the organisation’s image and provide more ways for target publics to be involved with the Foundation. I learnt a lot just by listening to the input from different team members about this particular issue. Ideas, which will be implemented to address different target publics, included giving out PMH Foundation bravery awards and Stitches stickers to kids in hospital, sponsored tea breaks for staff courtesy of the Foundation and a TV commercial to position the Foundation as the key fundraising body of the hospital (look out for it on TV soon!!). Social networking sites like Facebook will also be key to establishing a separate (and more personal) identity for the Foundation. I will be interested to see how all of these tactics help to build awareness and a strong identity for the Foundation in the future.

These are only a couple of aspects of PR that I have gained valuable insight into at staff meetings. I sometimes have to smile to myself when I think of how much of what is discussed relates directly to the things I have learnt about strategic PR in all of my units! Always good to see how theory is applied in the real world of PR in practical ways.

Relationship building at Sunset

So as we all know, relationship building is a major tool used within PR for reputation purposes and also to create a better working environment. Relationship building is a major aspect of communications at Sunset Events with it used in aspects of employee and media relations as well as promoting goodwill.

Throughout the duration of my internship, social media was a big focus. Sunset has social media pages for all of their separate events along with official Sunset Events pages. On facebook, these pages are a great tool in creating two-way relationships with not only the punters but also large media partners and upcoming bands/venues. Only from working on maintaining these facebook pages did I actually experience how valuable they can be at building relationships and getting contacts with really important people!

Building relationships is also a major part of the culture at Sunset. Their workplace is very laid back and operates like a family as there are only about eight full time employees! The managing director, Dave Chitty, is very adamant about everyone working together and getting along as a team. Whilst I was doing my internship, we all participated in a weekly yoga session, every Wednesday at 11am. This was actually a great experience as you got to know the team and actually enjoy the working experience. We also went out to a group lunch and I really enjoyed meeting and working with everyone which made my internship a lot more meaningful. This team environment is also expressed to the public using social media and the internet which demonstrates that good employee relations can have many positive effects for an organisation. Did everyone else enjoy their working environment as much as I did??





The team doing our Wednesday morning Yoga session!









Not only was employee relations valued within communications at Sunset but as was media relations. They currently have in place a lot of strong long term relationships with various print, online and radio outlets which makes the communication job a lot easier! If you pick up any entertainment magazine such as The Wire, Drum Perth or X-Press I can pretty much guarantee a Sunset event will feature in there somewhere! However, having such strong relationships with different medias can sometimes cause problems. During my internship, there was a stage where The West threatened to break a media release embargo. This was because the information in the release was being featured on Triple J radio, however this is national. So because it was being broadcasted over east, people listening to the radio in Perth would have received the info a couple of hours before The West was able to publish their info (due to the embargo time). So they threatened to publish the info at the same time it would be heard on Triple J. In the end, there wasn’t really much Sunset could do to stop them. What do you think can be done about embargo times?? Do you think the West had the right to break it seeing as the info would be heard on Triple J anyway? In my opinion, I didn’t see the point in not allowing The West to do so if it was going to harm the relationship.

So relationship building was a major aspect of my internship and only by the end did I realise the real importance of it!! I hope your internships were just as insightful as mine was!

Melissa
Curtin Bentley Campus

Corporate Communication Policies - Red Tapes or Great Aides.

Dear all,

Happy Chinese New Year to all!

Time flies and this will be my final blog. The experience I had gathered so far has been truly, truly wonderful. More events and happenings have been going on that are keeping me on my toes.

One of which is Barclays Capital internal employee program called "Women Initiative Network" or WiN. This is a great initiative that encourages women in the bank to network and learn together.Of course, men are welcomed. There are sharing sessions such as luncheons with the high fliers as well as self-improvement courses like learning basic self-defence, make-up classes or how to brand yourself. All of these initiatives are geared to improving individual's life skills as well as opportunities to network.

Being new in this initiative, I was tasked to organise an upcoming event- a luncheon with a managing director based in Singapore. I was guided by 2 lovely colleagues and they gave me protocols and what to expect. Brainstorming session went on well until we have to seek Corporate Communication's approval for sending out the invite. One representative from Corporate Communications sharply reprimanded me to "follow the company's template/style" to which I was left speechless.

In a multinational company, I understand the policies in place to standardise communications across to clients, stakeholders, employees and so on. However I think there should be a consideration in the effectiveness of the message, not just on the look and style.

I am still waiting for the invite to be approved and hopefully there will be a greater flexibility in exercising our communication styles in the future.

Regards,

Ginny Chong

14094848

Curtin Singapore

FATHER I'VE LIED!

(Courtesy of NBC News)

Hi everybody, my name is Ali and I have started my internship with this well-established branch of an international humanitarian relief NGO in Malaysia, which I am not intending to disclose its name here. So what did I really learn in my first week?

Upon the first day of my work, I was tasked to a list of assignments in which one of them is to organize a charity sale of some kind of menswear in Malaysian universities. Both the country manager & my supervisor told me that the actual cloths’ price of which they intend ‘to market’ is more than RM1000 and the NGO is happy to provide the public the chance of RM200 per piece as a gesture of a win-win fund raising event! That is to say, consumer/donor will buy branded cloths, NGO will raise some fund for the poor…and it looks good nah?

So get this:

I ‘myself’ looked at the samples from the stock and by the first glance, I realized that they are not genuine…They are Chinese stuff...But I had to prove it with strong evidence. Therefore, I started to check the manufacturer’s websites and they had nothing similar on their site! Then I found this:

An advertisement on a Malay e-shop in which the negotiable retail price of the exact products, in exact variety of colors! with precise size range! comes as RM300 only! Here are some facts:

Fact #1: Philanthropic donors do not like to be betrayed by their favorite charity organization. I had to inform my supervisor about my findings. This NGO can cause more damage to itself in promoting and selling fake products as branded stuff than to help the poor people. I mean people are not blind and they can easily distinguish the not real from the genuine one. I still wonder why they ‘lied to me’ about the origins of the materials and introduced it on the first day as “branded and worthy of thousand”!

Fact#2: As a future PR practitioner, I have to only suggest transparency in communicating the origins of the commodity. But is this NGO willing to tell the donors that these menswear are fake?? Imagine saying, “Would you buy some fake materials with a reasonable price for charity?!” Well, it sounds silly to me really.

Action: I emailed the advertisement link to my supervisor, to the gift/donation officer I am working with, and they both ‘noted’ it and guess what?

Reaction: A day after, the advertisement in that Malay website WAS BROUGHT DOWN!! Coincidence? Indeed! People look at me differently now! My supervisor said “But the price is still reasonable, isn’t it?” What she really meant by this, is that she was confessing on their insincerity regarding the menswear without bothering to fix it for the future matters even!

Lesson#1: Do not lie to your interns! Because it will only damage your organizational reputation (especially if you are doing charity and humanitarian relief on the world scale) and will create a bad memory that may linger on.

Lesson#2: Do not underestimate your interns! Nowadays very few secrets can remain in the closet, especially when the world is connected through all types of search engines and social networks as the image above also portrays!

Leson#3: Be honest and candid with your target public. It does not matter whether you want to do marketing or PR, transparency is the key to credibility and credibility leads to reputation. No transparency, no reputation.

What would you do, if you were in my position? Please share your views.

Ali.

LUCT.

Employee Relations

Hi guys..
here is another issue I would like to share: EMPLOYEE RELATIONS.
Yesterday, it was the birthday of a colleague in the editing department and we made a surprise birthday party for her.
Then, i thought about the multiple lectures we had on Employee relationship and its importance.

I read in another post on the blog that celebrating birthdays etc.. are frivolous events that are not meant to enhance relations with the employees. But i don't think so, since @ TOTEM, though often there are many 'frivolous' events, there is no much difference in the hierarchical structure of the organisation. That is, the management do take care of its employees needs, they are very open and regularly involved in the day to day activities.

For instance, here each monday morning, we take breakfast together to narrate how we spent our week end.
then, they do celebrate birthday parties of the employees.
The management also ensures that each employee feels comfortable in what they are doing and they are encouraged to speak out their mind.

I, as an intern student, I feel extremely comfortable though i spent only 12 days up to now. I was warmly welcomed and I am encouraged to share my opinions on diverse subjects and activities that are done by the organisation. Employees are very keen to help others as well.

will update more soon...
Sabrina
xxx

PR and Employee Relations.

Hi guys,

Here is another issue I would like to raise. I have always thought that those companies with a good PR framework should have even better employee relations, because that’s what we have learnt from our books and theories. However, while working in the ‘real world’ I have felt on many occasions that PR is contributing more to other relations outside the organization rather than concentrating highly on inside. Sure, when it comes to presenting the organization to the society, we all look like one big happy family, and they are all for the causes the organization works as well as put their maximum effort to achieve these to be successful. But most of the time this is not enough because I noticed a few number of cases in which employee communication or rather the lack of it played a role in the unsuccessful execution of a program.

Lack of sufficient communication between one another and the policy of ‘each for his own’, I believe, is the problem here. Looking back into the days of internship, on many occasions I noticed that there isn’t as much as rapport between the employees as there should be. A lot of times, those in one section might not really know what is going on in another section or might believe that it is none of their business to find out what’s happening. Once, this happened during a workshop which was organized by one section. Two sessions of the workshop was left out, because the organizing section (CS) forgot to inform the facilitator (also a full time employer) from FP unit. When the session was on, the facilitator was busy with another client. Blame was on the organizing unit for not letting her know the time beforehand, as of course, it was their responsibility. But in my opinion both CS unit and FP facilitator was at fault. The facilitator who did know she had two sessions to take, I believe, had equally responsibility as CS to find out the time she had to present the sessions. If she had taken the initiative to find out this embarrassment could definitely have been avoided. This is just one such instance out of a few more I noticed.

I did not notice this only within the NGO I worked, but also in a PR firm where the employees had more rapport with the accounts they handled than between themselves. This I believe would be the case in such a firm (good rapport with their respective accounts) but internal relations within employees should be taken as seriously as external relations. My experience was that, when it comes to employee relations, a lot of times the companies, organizations (and even the NGO I worked with) have the belief that employee relations is all about celebrating holidays together, celebrating the birthdays of other employees and such stuff. These are important, but they are not as important as trust, confidence, openness, involvement, perspective or organizational structure and objectives, pride in where you work..etc. In other words, the birthdays and other stuff are just frivolous ways of neglecting real employee relations which uses communication as a tool to build up the trust, confidence, involvement, pride…etc I just wrote about. According to Arranof, Baskin and Lattimore, (1997), research shows that subject of interest to employees on a scale of one to ten, the top goes to ‘organizational plans for the future’, ‘job advancement opportunities’, ‘job related and how-to info’, ‘policies and practices’…etc while the bottom goes to ‘human interest stories about other employees’ and ‘personal news such as birthdays and anniversaries”.

Employees are the most important stakeholders in any organization, company or firm. They are no longer costs, but are a powerful asset. Hence, I think if the company does not realize the true meaning of communicating with their employees to get them involved, they are far from achieving their goals and objectives. What do you guys think?

Tc and Rgds,
Imaan