Improving The World Through CSR

Corporate Social Responsibility

I have discovered that Corporate Social Responsibility interests and fascinates me. Through incorporating activities and elements benefiting society, I feel I’m giving back to the community and the environment.

More and more companies are incorporating CSR into their business, as well as creating social responsibility webpages to showcase their morality. Large organisations involving themselves in activities and programs purely for the benefit of the environment and the wider community are the organisations that will develop long-term reputational and financial success.

On week three of my internship experience, I was invited to attend an important interview between an influential client and the owner of a Malaysian youth magazine. Our client was the managing director of Brickfield’s Asia College, a critically successful establishment involved in many projects and developments that benefit the disadvantaged, as well as the wider community.

The interview concerned a funding project called ‘EduNation’ where free online tuition is provided to Malaysian students. BAC is attempting to further develop the project to an international scale, for all age’s groups and children wanting to learn more. It was fascinating listening to the goodwill of BAC’s managing director.

He spoke with a general concern for the disadvantaged and less fortunate. This man explained current business initiatives of his college, such as giving scholarships to those who couldn’t afford education, projects empowering women, communicating with the ministry to allow refugees to sit examinations, and many more volunteer projects for students at the college.

The inspiring interview led the magazine director to actually request future collaborations on similar projects, as the two discovered their similar interests for their community.

The wider benefit for the environment is endless when large organisations begin to immerse themselves in sustainability. CSR allows people to come together to establish meaningful connections, improve the environment and help the less fortunate. As well as individually making the world a better place, large corporations can create a world of change through collaborating on CSR projects to improve the world we live in.

The Glamour Side of PR

Most people think of PR as an episode of Sex and the City. Maybe this is the case if you’re a 20 year veteran to the industry but starting off, not so much. There are aspects that are a lot of fun, but PR is a career that you have to work your way up which means starting at the bottom of a barrel full of mundane tasks. For me, these ranged from Library and IT support where I had to search for and scan in pages of articles published about Hames Sharley from various magazines, crop hundreds staff images in Photoshop for the email facial recognition database and create project sheet after project sheet.

For those of you that don’t know, project sheets are an A4 page including project content and images created with InDesign displaying each project Hames Sharley has ever worked on. Needless to say there are a lot. At first it was fantastic and necessary working with InDesign as I had no prior experience but then after around the 50^th project sheet, it started getting repetitive.

However, these were beginner’s tasks and I was soon thrown into press releases, writing articles for publication, external client newsletter (IntheNews), the internal staff eNewsletter, competitor analysis and website updates. My knowledge has grown exponentially in a range of tasks that I greatly value. My last day as an intern, I got to work on a submission which is a very important document determining whether or not the organization is chosen for a contract to a project. I was honored to be chosen and for the responsibility it entailed.

The most exciting thing for me was to see the project sheets for the WA Institute for Medical Research and Fiona Stanley Hospital (which can be seen from the freeway near Murdoch train station) come to life. Bravely I asked if Bec and myself would ever be able to do site visits to get a feel for current projects we were writing content for. My bravery was rewarded and the next week we set off to the construction sites. It really put everything into perspective. We could see the sheer size of the project and how much coordination it took to get all aspects working together and to a tight schedule. Even the smallest change in a design or subcontract with an electrician etc could mean added months to the estimated completion time. It was also great just to get out of the office for a few hours.