So this is it. I’m writing
this after just completing my last day at Lotterywest and god we ended with a
bang.
In the past week we (this
being myself, the Corporate Communications Officer and the Corporate
Communications Coordinator), had been doing the PR for the Saturday $30 Million
Megadraw. Every year the Megadraw was the Corporate Communications team at Lotterywest’s
biggest event. There was media everywhere, multiple media releases going out
daily, constant contact with retailers and much more. The impressive thing is
this was mostly completed while many other organisations and media outlets were
on break during the Christmas and New Year period.
But as well as this hectic
PR work (we had spent a lot of time the previous week planning for this) we
also had a slight crisis. Basically if you were a listener of 6PR Breakfast,
you would know that they do a segment called ‘The Rumour File’. On The Rumour
File a man called in and to the short of it, said that the Lotterywest
self-checkers were not accurate. For the record, they are 100% accurate, but
this one man created a panic between other lotto players. I felt this quite
definitely at the Lotterywest Headquarters and also at retail level. At
Headquarters our schedules were thrown out as we sent out media releases,
monitored and replied to people on social media, our manger spoke to 6PR and
got a segment done for the next day’s broadcast and we sent information to the
retail network and customer network about the accuracy of the scanners. My job
was actually to help turn the facts into understandable content for the
customers. I felt flattered that they gave me this job as it was important at
the time but as the Senior Manager said, the retail experience was valuable
here as I knew how to communicate with customers. Otherwise I wrote media
releases, fact sheets and replied to social media posts on behalf of Lotterywest
in what was a very busy few days. In the end it turns out this gentlemen was
not accurate at all but the reasons for that are unfortunately confidential.
So now to the Megadraw. A
lot of this was media relations which was a lot of fun. We had organised a lot
of different media to do stories at outlets. We ran a media call the day before
the Megadraw and had media at Lotterywest and the Communications Coordinator
had interviews all day long for television, print and radio and we put out a
lot of media releases to organisations all over the state. At the end of the
day we were dead tired and sitting in near empty offices (as it was in the
Christmas-New Year period), but feeling satisfied with the job we had done.
Overall my experience at
Lotterywest was extremely fulfilling. I learnt so much about not only Public
Relations, but also just the general day-to-day of working at an organisation.
I feel I have developed throughout this experience and take a confidence of
being able to complete PR work, anything from writing work to social media
control to event planning and much, much more. The experience I had was vast,
challenging and fun. The people that I worked with on a daily basis were not
only great to work with but also friendly, funny people. I feel really
appreciative of the time that they gave me, teaching me the ropes, and I feel that
if I were anywhere else I may not have learnt and experienced the full force of
Public Relations to the extent that I did at Lotterywest.
Above is a
link for a quick video showing the Megadraw campaign that I was working on.
Thanks for reading,
Scott
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