Having a Ball!

This past Saturday night (the 31^st of October), a lot of our hard work culminated when the annual Pink Ribbon Ball was held. It was an exciting (and exhausting) night!

I arrived to the venue (Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre) at 3pm. Because the ball itself didn’t start until 6, I got a firsthand experience of an event setup. It was great to see all the different subcontractors and sponsors that we had been talking to over several months come together and put together a vision we had been working towards for a long time.  Pre ball activities for us interns included setting tables with the catalogues and signs we had been working on, liaising with the set up crew and running through the run sheet and assigning tasks for the night.

Once the ball started it was all systems go! There were 5 interns to help run an event with over 500 people, which meant we were kept busy throughout the night. Our duties included co-ordinating a reverse raffle (where the last number drawn is the winner),  which meant running around to over 50 tables and collecting entries and sorting them ready to be drawn. I was the lucky (unlucky?) intern that stood on stage holding the entries whilst they were drawn, which was to be honest, a little intimidating!

The other highlight of the night was the live auction.  The interns were in charge of approaching auction winners to take their details and process payment. Keeping track of the highest bidder in a dark, crowded and loud room was certainly a challenge, especially when people were aggressively trying to outbid each other for items such as diamond rings! It was a pleasure talking to guests that were having such a good time for a wonderful cause.

This experience at such a prestigious and large event was a look in to a side of PR that I had never really considered getting in to. I enjoyed it far more than I was expecting (I’m not always the most outgoing of individuals) and I’ll certainly now look into developing my event planning skills further.

Thanks for reading!

Follow me…please?

The next big event at Networking WA is the Advanced Dental Artistry Perth (ADAP) charity ball. The proceeds of this ball will all be going to Parkerville Children and Youth Care.  

Parkerville is a WA not-for-profit that acts as an adoptive family for abused children, protecting and caring for these children through accommodation, education and employment training and therapeutic care. 

It’s no doubt going to be a great event for an even greater cause, but that’s not enough to guarantee attendees. It’s pretty crucial that in order for people to attend an event, they are going to have to hear about it first! 

That’s where I come in, apparently, as today I have been tasked with coming up with a social media plan for the ADAP Charity Ball – primarily focused around the events Facebook page.

It’s enough of a challenge remembering everything thing we’ve learnt at University let alone actually applying them to a real life situation, but one thing that has stuck in my mind is the importance of packaging information so it doesn’t look like blatant advertising. This is where completing a double degree with PR alongside Journalism no doubt comes in handy – the word NEWS WORTHY may as well be stamped on my brain considering how often I hear of its importance!

If I take that train of thought and apply it to this part of PR I guess I’ll be trying to package the information to make it newsfeed worthy? (And now I apologise for that truly cringe worthy joke). But jokes aside the problem I have already noticed with the ADAP Charity Balls Facebook page (without much of a foray into it) is its lack of user engagement. “Attendance” and interaction on the page is low, so I guess that’s my first port of call! And in the true spirit of a PR professional I’m already doing two things at once – finding myself thinking of ways to encourage visitor engagement as I finish this blog post, so I better get to it!

I hope everyone’s internship’s are going well, its not easy balancing university and work alongside an internship but we’ll get there.

Naomi