Last post

This is my last post on this blog so I just wanted to thank everyone who have made this internship successful: my parents for their infinite support and patience, my lecturer Mr. Veejayen Carpen, and all the MAM team for welcoming me in their organization.

This experience has been marvelous and it was nice to share part of it on this blog

Goodbye!

Nicolas Chaillet

Behind the scenes of a Facebook page

After insisting for weeks, my supervisor finally allowed me to use MAM’s Facebook page. The page does enjoy a relative popularity – 1500 ‘likes’ which is not bad for this type of NGO. Their issue was that they did not often use their page – last time in January…hence my insistence to use it.

Before, I thought using a Facebook page was summed up in simply posting stuff like on my own profile. I was wrong. My supervisor told the previous Facebook admin to explain to me how to use it. He showed me all the possibilities offered now by Facebook: we can now build an audience by boosting our posts, provided we give a little sum of money. The result is that boosted posts appear on the news feed of people who have not even liked the page.I was surprised to see what we can do. Now I know how all those unwanted posts appear on my page. 

But the question is when does a Facebook page stop being of public relations field to become pure marketing? The line is blurred.

Nicolas Chaillet

An air of Goebbels

Joseph Goebbels was the propaganda Minister of Adolf Hitler. As the fortunes were changing camps and the German people were losing faith in the regime, Goebbels gathered a huge crowd in Berlin and made a famous speech. During this speech, he used all his skills and expertise to convince people to continue supporting Hitler. It was so effective he said afterwards to his friends “had I told them to jump through the window (the speech was made in the upper floors of a building) they would have said yes.”

Goebbels during his speech at the sportpalast

I have always admired Goebbels for his skills and success in his job. Don’t get me wrong: what he did was horrible. He better had himself thrown through a window than doing his evil deeds. But still he was very good at what he did.

Here’s how I relate my experience to this:

My organisation (MAM) was organizing a meeting with young adults in the area to encourage an initiative of forming people about sexual education. I was asked by my supervisor to do all the communication part for organizing this event. She told me that all the previous attempts to organize such events resulted in failure, as people were not interested in coming to these kinds of meetings.

I told myself I had to be realist: if I just send mail invitations of a meeting about sexual education to young adults on a Saturday afternoon, no one would come. Therefore I decided to adopt another approach. I called different NGOs who shared common interests with MAM, asked if we could meet, and went to meet them to invite them for a possible collaboration. An amateur drama club was also invited, as I told them our organization would like to work with them to pass our messages through drama. A personal approach meant that the presence of each one of them at this meeting was important, and also they had something to win from it. All of them responded positively to the invite and the meeting was a success.

Of course this is thousands of miles away from Goebbels’ sad accomplishments. But I saw here the power of communications and public relations: choose wisely your words, angle and way to communicate your messages and you can perform miracles.

Nicolas Chaillet

Theory/reality clash

Hi everyone!

As I started my internship at the not-for-profit organisation Mouvement d’Aide à la Maternité (MAM), I was told there was no proper PR department over there. So I figured out I would be able to show them all the different techniques I learnt at the university and impress them.

“I've never been so wrong!” (Thorin, The Hobbit)

One of my first tasks for MAM was to draft a media release for a double event – an incoming press conference and the visit of the Minister of Gender Equality, Child Development and Family Welfare. One of the members sent me all the information needed, and my supervisor told me to write the text, without the title, name or date.

I used all the knowledge I had about writing techniques for media releases: use of inverse pyramid format, lead, one sentence per paragraph etc. As I proudly submitted the draft to my supervisor, thinking she would be impressed by the work she said: “that’s all? What will the journalist be writing in his article?”

As a former journalist, she told me the articles here are written differently. Furthermore she told me the journalists would not usually want to add much, that is why we have to do all the work and send something they could simply publish in their paper.

The use of the Curtin style guide for writing articles is not applicable in Mauritius. Articles are written differently: long paragraphs, even some repetition. I honestly find the Curtin style a lot better for news reporting, but for application here, one must comply to the local customs.

I am not saying the techniques I learnt were completely useless: my supervisor told me she liked the fact that I was able to write all the needed information concisely, but for the future, I’ll have to blend the techniques I was taught with the customs of the country.