A fresh pair of eyes

Starting a new job is always incredibly daunting, especially when you’re in a different country and you don’t have much knowledge to fall back on. In my second week in, I was asked to seek out an appropriate venue for a media event, I was stumped. I wanted to find a unique venue, but I also had financial restrictions along with space, catering, and visual requirements to fulfil.

I wanted a venue which was more than your standard hotel events room:

• Where guests had space to move around (while still being close to the city, otherwise attendance would fall) 
• Different events of the day (catering, meeting area, greeting area) could be separately set up to save time and maintain a professional and organised image. 
• Room for media to interview guests away from the noise of the event

When I first got the task, I felt completely bewildered. I hadn’t seen much of Kuala Lumpur yet, and my research was hampered by language barriers (Google Translate can come up with some strange interpretations) and my own lack of experience in event management. 

However, I eventually started to use my lack of Malaysia-experience to my advantage. Not being a local, I was open to researching venues some may not consider. This led me to discovering a fantastic venue at the Bird Park - usually a tourist destination. 

Turns out, there was an ideal meeting room which met all the requirements, and as a bonus it had a great visual element to lend itself to photographs and an overall relaxed atmosphere.

Kuala Lumpur Bird Park

A few lessons I learned from this events experience:

• Research facilities - It is so important, especially in a big city, to ensure guests can easily get to the venue, there's ample parking, and furniture availability (in this case many tables were required in a specific set-up). 
• Catering - Does the venue allow outside catering, or can they provide it? How will catering work with the venue? E.g will the room be too small, making it awkward?
• Financials - don't let costs get out of hand. A few places I looked at had reasonable starting prices, then costs grew out of hand when other factors are considered (may charge for extra furniture, cleaning costs). 
• Look at reviews - If you can find them, it's good to get someone else's opinion. Sometimes a location looks great until you hear others experiences. 
• Time - research what else is happening on the day and time of your event. Is it school holidays, or a public holiday? Will traffic be bad? What will the weather be like? 
• Photo opportunities - Photo's make a story! It will make it more likely to be published a resonates more strongly with the audience. As this article explains, having good photos should not be underestimated. 

Adding a photo to your tweet makes it more effective 

Some more tips on basic event planning I found to be useful are here.

Until next time,

Whitney Slater

Curtin Bentley 

And there goes my weekend.

What is public relations? From what I read from the results shown in Google, public relations is the professional maintenance of a favourable public image by a company, other organization or an individual in the eyes of the public. And to sustain a positive image of the company is to uphold a constructive relationship with one of its key target audiences, which is the media.

And so, here comes what has happened in the past two days. It was Curtin Sarawak’s Awards & Scholarship Ceremony on Friday (25th April) and Graduation Ceremony on Saturday (26th April) so I was asked to deal with the press together with one of my colleague, Lillian. As a PR practitioner, being in contact with the media is one of the most important part of the job. Without the media, what are we PR practitioners to do? So, my task for the night was to lead the press to their table and pass them each a hand out of the speeches and fact sheets. Before the event, my supervisor had me go all the way to the HR department to photocopy a few copies of these hand outs and all I thought was “Why do I have to do such trifling tasks?” Where is the public relations stuff that I am supposed to be doing?”.

But as I was standing there, I realize that this was more than just a petty chore. While waiting for the hand outs to be done copying, I got to read through them and understand how a fact sheet is prepared in the correct way as well as how speeches are drafted for the speakers. In fact, what I am doing is actually preparing a media kit for the press! And how could I have not realized that right from the beginning? Guess I was a little too nervous about doing this as this was my first time being present at an event not as a guest, but as a committee member.

Apart from that, I have also learnt an important lesson which is to present ourselves in the best image of our company as this will instill positive awareness among the public towards the organization. Because the way I present myself in front of the press indirectly shows how the company represents itself. Also, preparing fact sheets and writing speeches for people are certainly not some simple tasks. Imagine getting the facts on the fact sheet wrong and drafting a speech with lots of grammatical error. Mistakes like these cannot happen as everything done has to be pretty precise. Public relations do not recognize such minor liability and blunders as they may end up becoming huge faults.


Until my next post,
Vivian Lee
15442668
Curtin Miri

A Late beginning with angelhands Inc

Hi Fellow PR393 Students!

I’m finally writing my first blog post since this is basically only my second week into my placement. It has been difficult for me to find an internship as I started out late and most of the organizations that I called already have a student intern with them. Though I have yet to regret my decisions as I am fairly please with my placement with angelhands.

There were quite a few obstacles I had to pass before I found my placement with angelhands. Some of which was as mentioned above as many organization have already taken in a student placement and then I came across Water Polo WA and got in contact with the person in charged. Because they have just got a student that would be interning with them this semester, they have referred me to the Melville Water Polo WA with my main focus being The 2012 Tom Hoad Cup which takes place at the end of the year. I was so excited to start with them but it was most likely impossible as the final report is due in mid November and if I decided to go on, I would not have gotten very much experience as they only need me most in the months of November and December. Plus I would not have been able to finish my report in time by the due date. So I continued looking and got referred to angelhands by another not-for-profit organization and that is how I got to this point.

I know there are only 5 weeks of classes left so it is going to be a challenge with how much I will be able to accomplish when working in the public relations sector at angelhands. But I am willing to put in the time and effort to learn as much as I can from them and experience first hand in a real life job in PR. So I have decided to come in 3 days a week, every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday to get as much time in as I can manage.

 Angelhands is basically a not-for-profit organization that helps traumatized victim of crimes. This could include individuals or families who have been affected either by homicide or by serious personal violence. In addition, there is only one paid staff within the organization while the rest are either volunteers or student interns just like me. This is definitely not like a usual PR internship one would look for and that it why I am so excited to learn about how their organization operates and everything else that comes with it.

Because of my short placement with the organization, my supervisor has got me to get straight to work; though my first day was quite breezy. I went to the National Health Awareness Day where there were many other not-for-profit organizations just like angelhands. My job for the day was to check out all the different organizations at their stalls and look at the type of marketing and promoting strategies that they have incorporated. The point of this was to gather information on how angelhands can improve to become more creative in the future. I also listened to how my supervisor and volunteers of angel hands spoke to the people and I tried speaking to them myself but I definitely was not ready for such a huge leap though talking to other not-for-profit organization’s staff members was quite interesting as they not only share their promoting tricks but what the organization means to them and why they chose stick by it. The experience that I have acquired on that day totally intrigued me. I just could not believe the stories I was hearing, as I never knew how one’s life could be so terrifying.

Overall the first day on my internship was very much a chilled out day as I ended at 2.30pm. But I must say, it got me thinking and wondering what I would be assigned to do for the PR side of things. I’m glad that I have chosen this organization as my placement for PR Professional Practice 393.

Till the next post then (:

<3 Deanna C.

My Second Week

My second week in Global TV was a bit different, it was hectic! I was not at all prepared to see what was there. I knew that there was going to be a lot of work but again I did not expect THAT much.

It came as a shocked, it was so different than my first week. First there was a press conference. It was not quite as I expected, maybe it's because that Global TV as its image is more lenient as compared to other company. The press conference involved question and answer session, band performing and free lunch for the journalists and reporters! And this press conference was in regard of an upcoming yearly event, MTV Staying Alive, an event that celebrate the 1st of December as World AIDS day, also a form of community social responsibilty or CSR. It was quite interesting, it was my first time actually experiencing a press conference.

The event took place at the end of the week, which is on the 14th of December, right 2 weeks after i started working. It was hectic and I was responsible for the media stand. Every journalists and reporter who were going to do a coverage on the event would have to register in the media relation booth first and I was in charge of that! Well, I had to also give out merchandise and handband so that the media can go backstage to interview band personels and cover their story.

The event went on for 12 hours, from noon until midnight. I could only stayed for half of it, but my job was actually done right after the media relation booth closed, which was at about 3 pm. I have realized that many of the times, the journalists and reporters chose to come late, it is at their lost as much as ours actually. We need the coverage and they need to write something, thus at that point it came quite as a disappointment. Other than that, it went pretty well.

In between the press conference and the real event, my task was mostly faxing. There were so many invitations to fax!! I guess to get a wide coverage you need a lot of media, it was such a tiring job but it went pretty good. There were also so many press releases to print and photocopy because for every media that come they all need at least one pice of press release. That really taught me the importance of press release!

And that was the exhausting second week ... maybe it does not sound much, but there was actually so much to do!