Practice what you preach!

I can't believe that I'm nearing the halfway point of my internship! Each day and week has flown by and I hadn't actually realised how much I've done and learnt until I flipped through my daily journal that I've been keeping and having a read of the tasks I've been assigned. I feel that I've l grown a lot as a person and as an industry professional over the last couple of weeks - if on my first day I'd been asked to ring The Sunday Times and ask for clippings to be sent out to us, or asked to ring publications over east to find out deadline dates for publication, I would've freaked. But now that's everyday work for me, and I've become so accustomed to picking up the phone and ringing clients and media, and I think that's a really valuable skill to have in PR so I'm definitely thankful for that.

The biggest lesson I feel I learnt this week was to practice what you preach. In PR in general, and here at Devahasdin, we have a big focus on treating everyone like they're our family, going the extra mile for our clients and being understanding with the media. I've always known that Devahasdin is one of the best PR agencies in WA, but that was really reiterated to me this week through the event we worked on Monday night and through the way we've worked as a team together.

On Monday night we had a small corporate event for one of our clients. It was a simple 100 person stakeholder event with food and drink, a quick speech from the CEO and a short 2 minute video from the company. It sounded simple, and we thought we were all prepared come Monday morning ready to just do the name badges. We heavily heavily heavily underestimated the time it would take to format 100 names onto name badge templates, print them, cut them, put them in plastic and have them lined out on the table at the event ready to go by 5pm. At 4pm, the office floor was absolutely covered in little bits of paper with names of guests on them, the printer was spitting out more and more labels, in between jamming and running out of paper, we were hurriedly trying to check names off the list, cut and stuff them and have them stowed away, all while our director was frantically ringing us from the venue asking us when we would be there. You can only imagine the chaos.

Eventually there were two of us left to do that job with a taxi on its way to come and get us, and we had to pack up our portable printer, bolt to the taxi and head to the event, without the faintest idea of what we had remembered to bring and what we had forgotten. Then the event itself was crazy stressful as we were still short on a few name badges and had a few last minute event inclusions, so were trying to quickly type up and print name badges to the side of the event whilst maintaining a "calm and friendly persona." Although we thought the event had been a disaster all because of these damn name badges, it went off without a hitch and due to everyone's ability to keep smiling, remain calm and put on a confident front, nobody knew the amount of stress we had just endured. It was definitely a learning experience, as there's always things to learn from mistakes, and we were really thrilled that the client was pleased and we did ourselves proud.

Despite our stress levels that night, we all treated each other like family, and constantly kept encouraging each other, working hard and being praised by our director. It was really impressive to see how the team rallied together and got the job done, and was a true testament to the culture at Devahasdin PR and the ability to 'practice what they preach' in regards to treating clients well. It would be pretty ironic to have any kind of PR organisation that stresses employee relations and open communication, but then turns around and treats their staff badly! We were all rewarded the next day with an invitation to an event at our director's house next week and big thank-you for our efforts the night before, and seeing the event run so smoothly was so rewarding. Makes me super excited for future work in PR!

I'll be posting next week and will look at my week's work as well as any other lessons I've learnt!