Hi everyone,
It’s really enjoyable reading everyone’s experiences and seeing how different organisations operate. I think it’s interesting that we are all doing a PR major or degree yet in our PR placements we are all doing extremely different things and it is exciting to see that there are so many different things to venture into and that every organisation is different depending on what works best for them.
At Lifeline WA things are in overdrive planning for the Black Diamond Ball. We’re all getting a little crazy planning, sorting, organising, call…well you get the gist of the craziness. I think the best part of this event is that amongst all the craziness, we find 2 minutes in the day to just laugh the silly mistakes we’ve done, the silly comments we’ve made to people on the phone in our frantic state and it really just eases the tension a bit.
The Ball was only a few weeks away and we had a capacity of 1000. Early bird ticket sales had been and gone and only 20 were sold, since then we have only sold another 200 tickets. The team was getting really worried that we wouldn’t have enough people and it would end up costing us more to run the event seeing as people weren’t buying tickets.
It was my job to then use the client list from last year’s Men in Black Ball and call everyone to ask if they wanted to be sent information about this year’s ball and if they wanted to attend. Like I said before, 1000 people attended last year, so you can imagine how much I hated that phone by the end of the day. However all in all I must say calling the individuals definitely gained more ticket sales.
Another task that was given to me was the write media releases and send them to different media outlets to promote the ball. I must say I had to brush up on my skills quickly before I handed in what I had drafted up and it definitely took me a good 20minutes to get started, but once I started writing, everything came back to me and I walked into the marketing and fundraising office and handed my finished copy with a big smile on my face.
To my surprise, they loved it and after tweaking a few things they were happy to send it out. Along with writing a media release to gain more publicity for the event, we already had a radio segment set up with the CEO at 96.1 FM and 6PR, so it was my job to email a fact sheet to them about the event. I got such a thrill from doing these things I must say it was definitely a highlight, especially to know that my colleagues trusted my writing skills.
Other tasks I did included writing descriptions of auction items and inserting it into a word document along with a picture and making everything symmetrical and pretty….this was such a tedious process because the computers were so slow, it definitely tested my patients and I must say I did lose it a few times, but it just showed me how much harder I had to work so that the event ran smoothly and we could raise enough money to maybe replace these ancient computers!
I also had to call volunteers to make sure they wanted to help out at the ball and what times they wanted to work and transfer all the data into a spread sheet so we could keep track of how many volunteers would be attending on the day and how many volunteers we needed a what particular time.
The diverse range of jobs I have been performing is really the best way to learn about PR because you get to learn a little bit of everything.
I hope you are all having a great time and learning as much as you can.
Until next time,
Jessica Dreier
14270952
Bentley
3 comments:
Wow, seems like you've gained extensive practical experience from your placement - which is great! At times, my placement also felt like it was heavily based on event management, but every now and then specific PR type jobs would come about and I would immediately snap up the opportunity to tackle them (which sort of sounds similar to your experience). Although, even the tedious jobs can be the most valuable!
I've read your above blog post as well and seems like the ball ran relatively smoothly, so congrats with that :)
So from your experience, do you see yourself going into the events management area of public relations?
Personally, I think it can be at times overwhelming and challenging, but definitely an area I would consider :)
Hayley S
Hi Jessica,
Your placement sounds great, some of the tasks you have had to do must have really tested your PR skills but its great that they loved what you wrote. How did the ball end up going.
I really wnat to go into events management so its great to see what was required of you during your placement as it heavily was involved around events management!
Anyway good luck in your report
Porscha Turco
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