Uni Life Meets Real Life

I’ve officially made it past the half waypoint of my internship, and have come to notice a very important activity in public relations that I hadn’t realised before. Over the duration of the past two weeks I’ve found myself helping to create, update and validate databases for not only the PR consultancy I’m working at, but also for major clients.

Some are the databases are internal, consisting of media contacts, that become extremely helpful when creating lists of people or companies to contact when sending out press releases. Other databases I’ve contributed to, are maintained by us for particular clients that allow them to easily organise and access their clients at a click of a button, putting in place a tool for the effective communication distribution internally and externally. 

Having databases makes everyday PR life so much easier, however a great deal of work gets put into them, not to mention just how time consuming and sometimes monotonous they can be. Today I stared the process of creating a database from scratch for the Managing Director to have his entire list of stakeholders right at the tip of his finger.

The first step is to put all the contacts into Excel, including their name, position, company of employment, phone numbers, email addresses, mailing address and any direct meetings, notes and interactions he’s had with the particular contact. Oh and I should mention there are over 400 stakeholders in letter A alone! (Yes there are 23 more letters to go and no, I’m not doing it alone, thankfully)

What’s most interesting is that the finished database will have a section where

stakeholders are classified by Mitchell et al’s stakeholder salience theory with the well-known attributes, power, urgency, and legitimacy.  This helps to define their role to the organisation and categorise their position among others, helping our consultancy make better informed decisions when dealing with specific stakeholders. I believe every third year Curtin University students should be quite familiar with this theory at this point in time, I guess all those long Corporate PR seminars have finally paid off for me.

I've definitely come to experience first hand that stakeholders are the key to good public relations and emphasis should be put on the way they are categorized and managed in organisations, as this will directly alter relationships. No matter how small a stakeholder is they there are still valuable to the organisation, so its important to not overlook them.  

Only now that I’m actually using the stakeholder salience theory and witnessing how it contributes first hand to PR, can I understand how theory’s learnt in University contribute to the real world. Many times as students we learn theories and think we'll never have to use them once we graduate, but this is clearly not the case, it seems many organisations are following the very things we're learning every week in class.