The 'hands-on' side to Public Relations

Hi all,

For those who don't know me, my name is Elliott Telfer, I'm in my final year final semester of my Public Relations/Marketing degree with this practical component being the final hurdle. For my placement I managed to secure a place at RugbyWA (Emirates Western Force) as an Events Intern. Now on paper I know this isn't a PR internship as such, but there are a lot of similarities between these fields that I have experienced in my short time at the club.

For starters, due to the importance of budget at RugbyWA there isn't a PR department, rather the duties are split between the Events, Branding, Partnerships and Media/Communications Departments which as some of you may have found is a rather common occurrence. How this all flows is that the Branding team (Brand positioning and image) work together with the partnerships team (Attracting and maintaining sponsors and key stakeholders) and come up with a direction that best fits the direction of the club, which is then passed on to the media and communications team to promote, publish and inform the ideal audience, which is in most cases the current and potential members. The final stage is left to the events team, to plan, create and implement everything that the early stages have required.

This is where I have been able to draw my biggest comparisons from my degree to the big stage. Home games are the biggest events put on by RugbyWA, drawing in anywhere from 10,000 - 24,000 fans in what we refer to as the 'Sea of Blue'. The first game v The Cheetahs was such an amazing experience, and despite the agonising final minutes loss, I was in solid state of euphoria of the planing and preparation that goes into a seemingly simple event. I couldn't believe how stupid I had been in my assignments, using my main 'pitch' as a big event of some description with little thought into the 'minor' details.

In the weeks leading up to the game I was told to use Murphy's Law (Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong) as my motto. I had to make a plan to fix the probable errors in the plans of a plan. It was 'Planception'. Such planing included inventory of decorative banners and signs, replacing those of retired or traded past greats of the team (oh the complaints you get from the passionate fans for getting this wrong) and organising alternate parking passes for high-end stakeholders because their original parking spots hadn't finished being reconstructed. The day before the game, the truck usually used to transport our signage container to and from the ground broke down so I had to find and hire an alternate on short notice, not easy. On game day at 12pm we were allowed into the ground for the first time, only to realise that none of the new LED signage was working properly and as a result we had to explain to the sponsors why they had paid for something that just isn't going to be there. We had to set up the function rooms, player change rooms, replace light globes in the medical rooms, ensure the ball boys had five bottles of water and five sandwiches, not six as was demanded. Provide Foxsports, Game announcers, photographers and security with copies of the team sheets. When the game started we have to suit up, and no matter how much was going wrong or how urgent a task was, we had to smile and walk calmly, because if the supporters see us running and panicking, so will they.

The amount of stuff I would have never ever thought to have put in place in planing an event for PR is insane, had I gone out into the real world and put on a PR event like I had previously suggested in some of my assignments I would have been the record holder for worst event planner in the history of man. There is so much beyond the theory associated with this field that it has me constantly thinking and excited about how much of this field am I yet to fully experience.

Sorry, this blog post was a bit longwinded, but there was no easy way to describe what I have fully experienced in the first six days of my internship, my image of PR has completely changed in the last few weeks!

Thanks for reading!

Elliott Telfer

(Also just so you know, the events team isn't as large as you may think, it consists of the two people, The events manager (my supervisor) Mrs Mary Petrie and her seasonal intern yours truly. now how big does the workload seem?)