Saving the day.

Hi to all!

So I have nearly reached my fourth week of my internship at Medine Limited and to be honest, I already feel like I am part of the team and I have always been!

The last week I have spent in the office was a little more hectic than what the normal hectic and busy is. Due to the fact that Medine Limited is a huge business, Medine Leisure & Tourism has decided to wake up and do a kind of recap of the month of August in the form of an e-card. This particular e-card is to be sent monthly to the tour operators associated with Medine Leisure & Tourism, to show a recap of the events that happened. Having that in mind, the e-card was sent to us and we had to be quick in sending it back with feedback. My supervisor then decided to include me in the equation by asking me if I had any comments.
The first thing that I had noticed is that the image quality of the card was very poor as the images were pixelated.
Secondly, the text that accompanied the images were not that great in sentence structure, level of English as well as grammar. There was one or two grammatical errors and the English was more spoken that written.
Third, while scrolling down, I suggested that the sponsors involved in the activities of Medine Leisure be brought upward as it was placed at the edge of the card at a considerable distance between the text and the end of the card. Seeing this, I thought maybe some might miss it.
Fourthly, on the card, Medine Leisure has placed 6 stories in total and when having a good pro-active thinking, I suggested to reduce the amount of stories to 3 or 4 in the possible event where in a month there is not more than 3 stories which are newsworthy enough to be placed on the card.

Having done this, the hectic day was not finished. Another mail came in with corrections that are to be made to a PowerPoint presentation for Medine Property.
The only problem with the PowerPoint document is that it was done by an external publicity and design agency.
The ONLY problem is that nothing was compatible with our programs in the office (which is the latest) and the PowerPoint in itself was converted into pictures which made things uneditable.
Because my colleague was going nuts at all the work that was falling on her head, I decided to help her a little.
I took the PowerPoint and with my design skills I edited everything that needed to be edited. There was a few grammatical errors and a few times they had the numbers wrong. Due to the fact that it was in picture form, it took me more time than ever to edit those slides as I had to edit the pictures itself on Adobe InDesign CS3.

What I have learnt this week is that hiring another company to help in a project is not always a good idea. It took us a whole lot of time to edit and correct.

Until my next post I send my regards.

Roxanne

Public Relations = Being Versatile, Polymath and Multitask!

Today was the 8^th day of my internship. I actually cannot believe it, I feel like I have started months ago. Indeed, those 8 days have been quite demanding and stressful but I have to admit it was worth it!

During those two and a half years at university I have learnt that to be a good PR one will have to be versatile and often multitasking. However I never really realized how true this was until now. I always thought that in ‘real life’, I would only be dealing with the journalists and writing several press releases and kits, while designers and event planners would be doing the rest. The past days proved me wrong; I have learnt that the role of a PR is much more than that! 

Sunday 1^st of August, 12 Monkeys (My organisation), organized a charity event called the ‘Charity Run, Ride, Walk by SKC Surat’. Before the event, I wrote the media releases, called the press and helped for the Facebook page. I thought that as a PR, my job was done.

The track for the races was in the sugar cane fields around the Bagatelle Mall of Mauritius in Moka. On the day of the event, at 6:30 a.m. we went to put the markups in the sugar cane. I came back full of mud and dust and was now posted at the registration table as to take more candidates. At the end of the event I said to myself, ‘maybe the person in charge of this was not here’.

On the Monday morning, I started my PR task, which is Media clipping, when my supervisor called everyone for a meeting. One of our clients, Permoglaze (a paint manufacturer) was sponsoring a major sport event and needed an idea to attract people on the day without proposing paint (as it was not really relevant). There I was, giving ideas about how to design the Permoglaze tent! We came up with an idea of ‘photo booth’, where the participant would be able to take a picture and print it directly. It was a great experience to see the brainstorming during the meeting and I was proud as one of my ideas was approved. 

I spent the whole week juggling between designing banners, newsletters, bibs for coming sport events and Facebook pages. I am actually planning and organizing two different event at the same time, a press conference which will be held this Tuesday and a sport event which will be held on the 24^th. In the meantime, I am helping on photo shoots for newsletters.

To resume, it has been 8 days, and I worked as an event organizer, a PR, a receptionist, a designer and a photographer, all of these, in the office as well as on the field.  One might think that my supervisor just wants me to touch a bit of everything, but this is not true as even she is doing every single job. I thus realized that all of these forms part of a PR job. 

To be a good PR, one must be versatile, polymath and multitask!!

Isabelle