Rio Fever Hits WAIS

As you might expect, the Paralympic Games is a very busy time at the Western Australian Institute of Sport (WAIS) due to the involvement of a number of Western Australian athletes in competition. It is the communications personnel’s job to keep the WAIS website and social media platforms completely up to date on all things Rio, including who is scheduled to compete, who has competed and what  their results were. This is where I came in. My supervisor was required to travel over to Rio during the Games in order to complete public relations duties for the Australian Wheelchair Basketball and Wheelchair Tennis teams, hence leaving me to supply everybody with all WA athlete information through the before mentioned channels. As WAIS is a professional organisation I found this task to be quite daunting at first having never experienced quite this level of responsibility. I felt as though there was a lot of pressure on me to produce content that was not only accurate but also timely and consistent.

With this in mind and knowing that I would be busy with other uni work on top of this ten day commitment to the Games, I had to ensure that I was very organised in the lead up to the Opening Ceremony. As previously produced for the Olympics, I created a detailed timetable including the times when all of the Western Australian Paralympians were scheduled to compete. I also wrote out everything I would have to do on each day of the Games in order to make sure I had everything covered. Additionally, I also sourced a number of images for social media posts so that I wouldn’t have to spend time doing that at a later date. I found all of these strategies I put in place to be very useful as each day I went down my checklist and ticked off the items as I completed them.

Through producing content for the Paralympics, it gave me a greater understanding of the depth of information that you are required to provide to stakeholders. Whilst I had done a lot of research on the Games and the athletes in the lead up to the Paralympics, the majority of WAIS’s stakeholders would not have this knowledge and therefore I had to carefully think about this with everything I wrote. Was I providing enough information to inform those who had limited understanding?

This point was made extremely clear to me when I showed one of my peers an Instagram post that I was planning on posting. In the caption I had written about a Western Australian wheelchair track athlete and the event which she was scheduled to compete in on the next day of Paralympic competition. What I had written followed similar lines to “Madison de Rozario will be competing for gold in the 1500m.” On reading this I was questioned whether it was 1500m of swimming or 1500m of running. Reading it back now, it is very clear that for those readers who have limited background knowledge, this sentence would be very confusing. Just the simple addition of a few words could make a world of difference; “Wheelchair athlete Madison de Rozario will be competing for gold in the 1500m track athletics event.”

Whilst on social media you have to be very selective and succinct in the information you choose to convey, when writing an article for the WAIS website there is greater opportunity to provide depth of information. Having said this however, I found that it is still very important to be selective, as whilst you can provide more information, some information may only be understood by a person highly versed in that particular sport. This isn’t to say that I couldn’t use sporting terminology, I just found that if I did, it would have to be explained further to ensure readers understood what I was trying to convey.

Additionally, the general content of the information being produced is also something which I had to consider wisely. What do people need to know? What do people want to read? In order to answer these questions I relied upon some of my own ideas as well as what my supervisor had previously produced during the Olympic Games.

On every day of the Paralympic Games I provided one infographic which had the names of all athletes competing on that day in one place, which could be easily read when scrolling through Instagram. The captions accompanying these images then went into greater depth of what events the athletes were competing in. Along with these images I posted individual photos for each athlete that had competed the day before, writing their results in the caption. As suggested by my supervisor and to make life easier for myself, I shared all Instagram content to Twitter so that both platforms were receiving the same information and hence informing people in the same way.

Most of the people who read the website articles are there because they want more in-depth information on an event.  In considering this, on each weekday I aimed to produce individual articles for each sport which informed people of the Western Australian’s who had competed in that sport the day before, including information on their performance and results. On the weekend I produced one ‘wrap-up’ article for each day which summarised all of the Western Australian athlete’s performances for that day.

In all the information which I produced for the WAIS website and social media platforms throughout the Paralympics, the greatest challenge was overcoming the time difference. As anybody who would’ve watched the Olympics or Paralympics would know, in order to watch any event live you would have to be awake all night in Western Australia. Because of this, I found that I was often uploading a lot of social media content in quick succession first thing in the morning. A more effective social media strategy would be to spread out the posts throughout the day, however in aiming to deliver the information in a timely fashion, this proved difficult.

Overall the experience of taking over the WAIS website and social media content throughout the Paralympics is one which I have learnt vast amounts from. I learnt that the golden rule was that you can never assume that somebody will know all the information that you do.