Election PR

Hello fellow junior PR practitioners!

I have finally made my way onto this blog. I am doing my placement at Telethon Speech & Hearing which is a not-for-profit. It is a beneficiary of the well known (in WA) Telethon weekend fundraising event which is coming up in only a few weeks time, but more about that closer to the date.

My working hours have slowly been ramping up from one day a week, to two a week and now do three per week, stretching my already tight schedule. However, this has been due to the abundance of things to do. My supervisor has been great in giving me a wide variety of different types of PR work to do as well as a bit of more marketing oriented work on the side.

Working in a small organisation has so far been great in allowing me to have access to all employees and the CEO in a casual and friendly environment. It also is great to be able to talk informally to the medical specialists and others that do the core work of the Centre, as I needed to get upto speed early on about some intricate details of the range of services that are provided to children accross the state.

I have been able witness the power of PR on policy makers first hand. Last Friday the Centre held its first (of a hopefully annual) stakeholder breakfast at Burswood. This event required substatntial planning beforehand and then getting up at a totally ungodly hour to rehearse and prep on the actual day. The guest list included many prominent social, media, business and political personalities who were seated at tables with a senior staff member from the Centre. The excellent presentation (including some compelling figures) by our CEO seemed to strike a chord with some particular audience members. The next week there was the annoncement of the policy of free universal infant hearing screening by the ALP as part of their election platform.

This was very exciting to watch and observe the behind the scenes action that followed the breakfast to the election promise days later. The event itself was a success and saw me trying my hand at photography, which was made easy thanks to the great digital SLR that the Centre has. It was amazing to see how prepared my supervisor was in case of any eventuality, some of which did actually occur to my surprise. But I guess this helped reduce the stress of holding a large, new high profile event and ultimately paid off.

That's it for post #1.

More later.