In the lead up to the University Games coming events most of my job has been data entry and a lot of it. We need to know who tried out, who qualified for a team, who is coming to uni games etc. I was vaguely familiar with excel before I started my internship, but now I know it up-side down and side-ways so I guess that it has been a valuable learning experience.
I think, we forget sometimes that although an integral part of our jobs will be developing and implementing public relations strategies, most of our day-to-day tasks will be all the leg work done behind the scenes. And much to my dismay most of that will be data-entry. I do have some exciting news though, so far I have 152 people attending our University Games Information Session! I am quite impressed considering I only put up the posters and facebook event last week.
That's another thing I wish I had practised before I commenced this internship, poster making! Who knew it could be so challenging? Especially when I can "only use colours that use the least amount of ink" and I have to use the black and gold colours to match our branding... Not as easy as I thought it would be! The first few I tried to make looked like something right out of primary school. But practise makes perfect and I found the best thing was to look at other organisations' posters and get a rough idea of how they are supposed to look.
Getting the word around campus that Uni Games is back again was not as hard as I first thought. I did the usual run-around with posters, fliers, facebook events, website updates but I found the best tool by far was word-of-mouth! Most students seemed pretty keen to spread the word and get their friends involved also. The only problem I am having is weeding out the students who simply want to come along to Uni Games just to party and have no real interest in playing sport, but we are monitoring that pretty well by getting teams to meet up and practice. So we can monitor who is putting in the effort.
I would definitely say a big lesson I have learned is once you have spread the word as much as you can it is really important to wait and see how well it worked and where it can be improved for next time. Good observation and evaluation is really important and can teach you a great deal.
Bye for now!
Jade
2 comments:
I can completetly relate to your in depth knowledge of data entry!When I first started my internship I created shareholder, customer and staff databases for the company-this was not a short process! In the end though it's definately the bestway to keep things clear and understandle, which I think in the long-run leaves more time for more enjoyable tasks which don't involve data-entry!
I also can relate to your experience with poster making. I havn't been doing posers but ads for newspapers, magazines ect. What I found difficult was making sure I created an an ad which not only looked great but more importantly communicated all the key messages the company wished to portray. Even after all the 'I hate in-design' comments and 'why won't it let me put that there..'how good does it feel to see your final poster or ad in print and out in the public eye?! Keep having a great time!
-Ruby : )
Congrats on the high attendance for the meeting for uni games! I totally agree with day-to-day tasks being the leg work, before implementing the PR Strategy. I spent a large part of my internship just researching the competitors and conducting an industry anaylsis. Even though it may seem mundane, knowing how to utilise Excel will definately assist you in future jobs and it is something that I personally need to build skills upon. Goodluck in finding particpants that actually want to attend Uni games for the sport, not for partying and goodluck for the the rest of your internship!
Amira
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