Admittedly, I am a little behind in my blog entries and as such I am going have to cast my mind back a week or so to reflect on the half-way point of my internship. Weeks 2 and 3 of my internship at Devahasdin covered everything from the menial tasks of mail-outs and media clipping to writing my first media releases and starting the preparation for a Christmas event for one of our clients.
To date I have played a fairly active role in executing tasks for the Kate Morgan account. These tasks have included writing some media releases about various Kate Morgan members for Community Newspapers, and writing and putting together the September and October Kate Morgan newsletters. The good old days of PR Techniques seemed a little distant as I sat in front of my computer pondering how to start my first release but I remembered the inverted pyramid and that was a good place to start. The media release was to be sent to the local paper of a member who had been chosen as a winner of a weekend escape for two to a luxury retreat in the southwest. The human interest component created a good angle to start with but obviously I also had to work in information about Kate Morgan and the programme’s benefits as well as the story of the winner. This presented a challenge as I had to try and find the balance between enticing others to join Kate Morgan and not making the release sound too corporate or hard sell. Feedback from the rest of the office was encouraging so when we needed a release for another local newspaper a few days later with a slightly different angle I was on it.
Over the past two weeks another task I have been working on is the preparation for a Christmas wine tasting event to be held by one of our clients, WineCow. WineCow are a locally run company that sell wine over the internet at ridiculous prices – if you consider yourself a wine connoisseur or a bargain hunter you should definitely check out winecow.com.au. After writing up the event brief it was time to start tracking down some venues. This proved to be an incredibly tedious task as just about every function centre across Perth is booked out well into the future and many of those that aren’t do not have the appropriate license for us to bring wine onto their premises. We have ended up with 5 – 8 possibilities to take to the client this week. One of these possibilities ended up presenting itself because the events coordinator of one venue that wasn’t available happened to also work for another that was. The events team at the alternative venue are very keen to host the event for WineCow and would also like to talk to them about sponsorship, so I am looking forward to presenting this to WineCow and seeing if this is something they would like to pursue.
One of my highlights over the last couple of weeks has been rising to a challenge given to me by my supervisor. I was handed the strategy for Adventure World’s season opening and set the task of coming up with another creative way to get people to Adventure World without spending any additional money. For the record, not spending any money tends to rule out a lot of possibilities. So, there I was with an incredibly creative strategy in hand with the sole purpose of giving my supervisors something they hadn’t thought of. They had covered every angle you could possibly think of and a whole lot more you probably wouldn’t so not only did I have to think outside the box I pretty much had to stomp on the box and then feed it into the paper shredder. But I did it (!) and my supervisor picked up the phone, called Adventure World and pitched the idea to them and then set about pitching the idea to his media contacts.
The rest of my days have been filled with phone calls to media outlets; checking the contact details of editors and deadlines leading up to Christmas. There have been a lot of these phone calls because we have a lot of clients across many different industries so there are a lot of different people to call. I’ve also been running around the city picking up promotion prizes from clients and delivering them to our various media partners. It has been great meeting some of the faces behind the companies we represent.
This week is my final week at Devahasdin but with a lot in the works I don’t expect things to be winding down.
To date I have played a fairly active role in executing tasks for the Kate Morgan account. These tasks have included writing some media releases about various Kate Morgan members for Community Newspapers, and writing and putting together the September and October Kate Morgan newsletters. The good old days of PR Techniques seemed a little distant as I sat in front of my computer pondering how to start my first release but I remembered the inverted pyramid and that was a good place to start. The media release was to be sent to the local paper of a member who had been chosen as a winner of a weekend escape for two to a luxury retreat in the southwest. The human interest component created a good angle to start with but obviously I also had to work in information about Kate Morgan and the programme’s benefits as well as the story of the winner. This presented a challenge as I had to try and find the balance between enticing others to join Kate Morgan and not making the release sound too corporate or hard sell. Feedback from the rest of the office was encouraging so when we needed a release for another local newspaper a few days later with a slightly different angle I was on it.
Over the past two weeks another task I have been working on is the preparation for a Christmas wine tasting event to be held by one of our clients, WineCow. WineCow are a locally run company that sell wine over the internet at ridiculous prices – if you consider yourself a wine connoisseur or a bargain hunter you should definitely check out winecow.com.au. After writing up the event brief it was time to start tracking down some venues. This proved to be an incredibly tedious task as just about every function centre across Perth is booked out well into the future and many of those that aren’t do not have the appropriate license for us to bring wine onto their premises. We have ended up with 5 – 8 possibilities to take to the client this week. One of these possibilities ended up presenting itself because the events coordinator of one venue that wasn’t available happened to also work for another that was. The events team at the alternative venue are very keen to host the event for WineCow and would also like to talk to them about sponsorship, so I am looking forward to presenting this to WineCow and seeing if this is something they would like to pursue.
One of my highlights over the last couple of weeks has been rising to a challenge given to me by my supervisor. I was handed the strategy for Adventure World’s season opening and set the task of coming up with another creative way to get people to Adventure World without spending any additional money. For the record, not spending any money tends to rule out a lot of possibilities. So, there I was with an incredibly creative strategy in hand with the sole purpose of giving my supervisors something they hadn’t thought of. They had covered every angle you could possibly think of and a whole lot more you probably wouldn’t so not only did I have to think outside the box I pretty much had to stomp on the box and then feed it into the paper shredder. But I did it (!) and my supervisor picked up the phone, called Adventure World and pitched the idea to them and then set about pitching the idea to his media contacts.
The rest of my days have been filled with phone calls to media outlets; checking the contact details of editors and deadlines leading up to Christmas. There have been a lot of these phone calls because we have a lot of clients across many different industries so there are a lot of different people to call. I’ve also been running around the city picking up promotion prizes from clients and delivering them to our various media partners. It has been great meeting some of the faces behind the companies we represent.
This week is my final week at Devahasdin but with a lot in the works I don’t expect things to be winding down.
1 comment:
Loved reading about your time at Devahasdin - I'm sure that I'll be seeing those new ideas for Adventure World on PerthNow...David is practically an honorary staff member there!
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