Final lessons from a PR pro

On my last day of my supervisor called me in to her office for a ‘chat’ about my internship. I won’t lie, I was nervous.  In my mind this was the part where she goes through all my intern work and scrutinizes it, evaluating my progress in a confronting finale to my placement. Of course that wasn’t the case. Instead, she sat me down and said she was going to give me the most important advice she could give about a career in public relations.

The first thing she spoke about was organisation. Specifically, emails. She told me that as ridiculous as it may sound, sorting your emails in to separate folders is the best thing you can do to stay on top of your workload. In a corporate PR situation, as it would be with any communications role, there is quite a bit of versatility in the work that you do. You may be dealing with writing an internal article one day and organising a sponsorship event the next, so it’s integral to be able to have each different sector of your work carefully separated. It’s no fun having to search through your inbox to look for an email or to forget to respond to something important. Organisation is key.

 

The second thing she told me was that no matter how much writing you do at university, nothing will prepare you for the amount of writing you do in a real communications role. She told me that you may write 20 PR plans during your degree, but you probably won’t even need that skill until you’re in a high level position. ‘Ninety per cent of my role is writing,’ she said, and now I’m grateful that I studied a few journalism units while I’ve been at university. 

My supervisor finished off our meeting by thanking me for all the work I had done and saying she’d happily write me a reference– this was nothing like the scary final meeting I had envisioned. I left feeling grateful that I had been able to have for such a rewarding and useful experience. 

When I got home that day I opened my email inbox. I had 3,109 emails. Would you believe it, I managed to purge every unwanted subscription and piece of junk until I had a neat inbox with a number of carefully organised folders. 

So here I am. Internship completed. I am now ready for a career in public relations and so is my email inbox.

Next stop...modelling career

Once you know the symbol for Programmed you see it everywhere you go. You see it on cars, on the shirts of tradesmem, but most of all on the guernseys of Fremantle Dockers football players. As a major Freo sponsor, Programmed appears on pretty much anything Dockers related. 

Pav rocks the green symbol

 In April I was lucky enough to be part of a photo shoot with some players.  Not only did I assist the photographer with taking photos and video for a new campaign, but I was asked to be a model alongside some well-known faces.The shots, which include players like Chris Mayne and Luke McPharlin, will appear in the next Dockers membership newsletter.

The Freo and Programmed team huddle

Unlike my coworker Brett (an avid Freo fan), I was able to keep my cool around the players. In the PR profession you are likely to come across people you admire. This experience made me realise the importance of maintaining a professional demeanour at all times. After all,  everyone is there to get a job done.

Recognise these blow-up anchors (below)? Every major Dockers sponsor gets one match per season to advertise their organisation. Every year on their day Programmed volunteers blow up over 15,000 anchors and hand them out to fans before the game. At half time the crowd is asked to wave their anchors in the air and the Programmed chief director walks out on to the oval and chooses a lucky fan to win a prize. 

Freo fans with their Programmed anchors

It all sounds like fun and games, but with my supervisor being the only communications employee based in Perth, there is a lot to do. The next few weeks will involve a lot of preparation, including trying to find 50 volunteers for the day. Busy busy busy!

Putting Skills to the Test

Nothing is quite as satisfying as seeing your hard work pay off. I realised that when I first got my hands on the special ANZAC Day edition of Programmed’s quarterly newsletter, which I had played a big part in producing. 

  The company newsletter goes out to staff in Programmed offices across Australia and New Zealand, and as part of the ANZAC Day special employees had been asked to send in personal stories about their family’s involvement in wars. A huge number of submissions were emailed in and they were all incredibly different. From a simple timeline of a great-grandfather in WWII to a hand-written letter from a man shot seven times during the landing at Gallipoli. There were tales from Vietnam, experiences on board navy vessels and stories from more recent conflicts. Sorting through these was no easy feat. In fact, it was pretty emotional. A lot of employees had gone to the effort to do some research on their families and write up a few pages on a relative who had passed away. It was moving to read how proud these people were of their ancestors. It reminded me that to do your job properly you’ve got to have some emotional investment in your work. Of course, at the stay time you have to stay professional.

One of the biggest challenges was that I felt I needed to do justice to peoples stories and represent them in the right way. I had to ensure that the articles made sense and were factually correct. Aside from looking at my finished articles from the perspective of the general reader, I tried to look from that of the person that had submitted it. With war being such an important and emotional subject for so many people, it was important not to misinterpret anyone.

 The other day I saw a guy who is part of the digital marketing company that Programmed hires for photo shoots and to print the quarterly papers. He told me that people in his Melbourne office had read the Anzac edition and really liked it, which pleased me a lot. The challenges in writing the articles gave an insight in to what it must be like to write professionally, whether it be for PR, journalism or any other role. It’s not easy to think that there will be people reading and scrutinizing your work, but in the end I'm proud to see my name printed next to these articles, especially for such a important subject. 

Get with the Program(med)

I spent the second half of 2014 as an exchange student in England, frolicking in the snow and sashaying across to Europe on the weekends. As you can imagine, getting an internship was the last thing on my mind during this time. When I arrived back in Perth, just weeks before the start of semester one, I suddenly realised that I needed to get moving.  After a frantic search I landed a placement at Programmed.

If you have no idea what Programmed is then never fear, I still wasn’t sure even after my first week working there. Basically, Programmed is a recruitment company that employs staff and tradespeople across a range of industries, predominantly in resources and property and infrastructure. 

 The Programmed logo

Across Australia and New Zealand, over 10,000 people work for Programmed on a daily basis. They have offices all over but their head office is in Perth, where I have been working. My supervisor, Kate, is the only Communications employee based in Perth, so she has a lot to do. Programmed is also a major sponsor of the Fremantle Dockers, so a lot of the work she does revolves around this.

In assisting her, my roles have included writing articles for the quarterly newsletter and intranet, organising corporate dinner events, producing website content for the renovated website and organising sponsorship events and competitions. 

To be honest, when I first started I thought working here might be a bit dull. So many blog posts tell of internships at exciting music festivals, in the fashion industry or at big events. However, there's so much diversity in the jobs I do and I've learnt so much about writing and sponsorship already.

Although it’s no match for gallivanting around Iceland, so far I’ve really enjoyed it and I’m looking forward to the next few weeks!