Fly me to Sydney?

Hi All!

So yet again, the busy life of a Uni Student slash PR work experience student has overtaken my time and I have not made a blog post in quite some time.

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Lisa Butcher and I’m doing my placement at Loaded Communications. Loaded is a small PR and Marketing integrated firm in North Perth. With only five other co-workers, I work alongside a Graphic Designer, Web Developer, Marketer, a Public Relations Consultant and the PR Director of Loaded. This team, although small, has the advantage of everyone working closely together on projects for clients that quite often overlap. I find this a fantastic work environment, as it is essential to communicate with all members of the team in order to achieve a consistent result.

Recently I was offered to work at the Australian Youth Affairs Coalition (AYAC) National Youth Conference in Sydney. As AYAC are a client of Loaded Communications, I have spent a lot of time working on the planning and organisation for this event, which is the first for AYAC in four years. So naturally, I felt involved with the event management process already and jumped at the opportunity to be flown to Sydney and work at this conference as part of a four-person team! This Youth Conference was held at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre right on the Darling Harbour!

Before you get too jealous, I will add that I have never been to Sydney before, so this experience not only allowed me to fly to a city I’ve never seen before, but I was given the opportunity to gain some on-site invaluable PR, Marketing and event management experience at this national event.

So on the Sunday before this three-day event, I was dropped at the airport where I met my two co-workers - Paul and Holly. Trying to contain my excitement, we landed in Sydney and took a taxi to the hotel. The Novotel hotel is in the ideal location for the conference - situated on the waterfront, just walking distance to the Convention and Exhibition Centre. This proved to be a huge advantage being the main event coordinators, as we needed to be close to the venue for transport of materials needed at the conference.

We met our co-workers Damian and Heath in the hotel for a briefing and started packing conference bags to be handed to conference participants. We spent some time learning how to use an iPad to register conference participants into our system for Monday morning. It just goes to show how technology has changed and how we now rely on high-tech systems in communication businesses.

Damian briefed us all on the activities for the conference and the expectations for Monday. He reminded us that the first day of the conference would be the biggest. I then promptly familiarised myself with the conference program: times, breaks and the speakers who I will be managing for Monday.

I was delegated the “Youth Development” stream out of four streams at the Youth Conference: Youth Development; Youth Sector Immediate; Youth Sector Advanced; Youth Research.

We then headed to China Town in Sydney CBD for a late dinner and didn’t get to bed until quite late that night. As we had to rise at 5am (I will note here that this is 3am Perth time) to be at the venue 6am sharp, there were not many hours of sleep to count on! J

Stay tuned for Day 1 of the AYAC Youth Conference!!

I will finish here by saying how lucky and appreciative I was to be offered the opportunity to fly across the country and spend some of my PR placement days working at a national event.

Thanks for reading guys!

- Lisa Butcher

Bentley

13964270