Newfound Glory!

Northway Christian Centre is in a great place at the moment! My placement is almost over as you read this, but the PR and Communications work you have been reading about still continues! It is a very bright and wonderful day for Northway to be standing on. This is why I chose 'Newfound Glory' as the title for this post. What do you think?

In the last couple of weeks at Northway I have been working extremely hard with the web site company that is designing the framework for our new website. It has been gruelling, challenging and most importantly, the hard part is almost over! All that's left now is the text to be filled in by myself and we should have a fairly healthy basis to critique before it hits the world wide web! I am so excited. Words can't describe my emotions towards this project of mine!

I have so much more respect for uni now that I have almost completed my placement. This placement has made me reflect upon EVERYTHING that Curtin has taught me over the years I have spent with 'her'. Curtin has given me a wonderful foundation in which to start from, but most importantly, a foundation to which I can grow from. This placement has also taught me things such as client deadlines, time management,  an increased professionalism, ethics, relevant corporate identities and lastly, an ascertain to my passion for public relations and all that is encompasses. I have enjoyed this role so much that I am negotiating with my Senior Pastor to employ me both as the Youth Pastor and Public Relations Officer at Northway (someone else would need to help me with the youth work). 

Lastly, I would like to thank everyone for taking the time to read through my posts. I hope they have been helpful and insightful as many of your's have been. I also wish everyone the best of luck as we all finish our final reports on our organisations in which we have completed our placements. 

Before I finish this post, I'll just leave this here. It was super simple and easy, but I think it fits it's purpose quite well (I took my Youth Group (Infusion Youth), to a youth conference a couple of weeks ago. I designed this card for each teenager in case of an emergency where they lost the 'group' and needed to contact us). Let me know what you think!

Kind regards, 

Thor Williams

13971186

Curtin Bentley

An Honest Logo

A logo is a truly important aspect for an organisation or a business. It acts as a brand, a 'go-to image', customers relate to the logo, and the logo itself provides characteristics that epitomise the company or organisation that it represents; an effective logo sums up the body that it represents.

This post focuses on an ethical dilemma that I faced towards my third segment of my placement at Northway Christian Centre. You see, for a couple months now we have planned a huge outreach style event for our community that would be held in our suburbs local community park. The event would be held just before Christmas and would have a large stage for live music and acts on the Saturday evening. The event would cater for over 2000 people and would lead into Sunday's morning church service for a 'Church in the Park' atmosphere. However, the main attraction for the event was the fact that on the Saturday, we are giving out over 1000 toys to the children of our community for free! What a spectacle this will be!

This is where the dilemma occurs... The event is purposely named very similarly to a famous animation movie (which is OK!), however the logo that was created by the graphic designer also resembles the logo for that particular movie all to well... Once I had caught eye of the logo I immediately (and professionally) approached the designer and questioned the ethics behind the design. They saw no reason to change the font, the colours or the  shapes that all formed the overall imagery and depiction of the logo. I insisted that the logo that he/she created would in fact be considered copyright infringement as Northway would be seen by the movie company to have been stealing their identity and using it to further benefit our cause. This could result in legal matters and that is the last thing a church needs as their latest communication to the world! Also the last thing we need our congregation (internal members) to associate/identify their leadership/management with. A couple weeks went by, and I was able to convince the graphic designer to meet with a media law expert to examine what would be considered right or wrong about our logo before it was published. The issues with the logo were sorted and everyone learnt a valuable lesson (including myself).

The graphic designer and I are actually best friends... It was hard remaining professional in this matter with  dealing with them, but it proved to be worthwhile as the situation not only improved our professional relationship, but also our personal relationship and respect for one another.

I hope this post helps some of you that are still working in your placements and are currently having similar ethical issues as I did. It is always worth it to do the right and honest thing! The last thing you need is to be left questioning yourself and your own personal beliefs!

Thanks for reading.

Thor Williams

13971186

Curtin Bentley

New Season

New season's resemble new beginnings, a fresh start, or even sometimes, can present a new goal to achieve... In my last post I mentioned that Northway Christian Centre was in a period of change. New branding, new internal communications, new employee branding and a new website are all what form the New Season which we are currently working on.  

This New Season all started out in April 2011 when Northway's previous senior pastor, Pastor John Warwick resigned from his position of almost 10 years and our Associate Pastor, Pastor Dean Evensen rose to the call. Since then, he has brought many new ideas to the table! One very important call he has made, is to re-invent Northway through firstly updating its vision and mission statements to portray the new 'personality' that the church is taking. 

The task was given to me and this is one of the challenges I was working on in my second segment of my placement at Northway... You see, creating a vision and mission statement might not sound to difficult. Heck, we've written up hundreds at uni... but creating them for an organisation in real life proved quite daunting to me to be honest. I couldn't believe that I had been given the tasks of creating such statements in which all change and future direction was going to be measured upon! To cut a long story short... I developed both statements in accordance to the key phrase in which Pastor Dean had given me: he wanted the church focus to be on 'children, family and community'. This task was truly intimidating, but extremely fulfilling as I now have the pleasure of knowing that such important statements were created, and entrusted to me. 

A further update on the website happenings:

At this stage of my placement, I had contacted and arranged a meeting with the photographer which we had chosen. I briefed him in regards to what key messages we wanted projected from the images on the website. It was also key that the 'style' and 'feel' of the images were also on par with the branding of the design of the website. This too was a highlight for me at this stage as it would seem that my new role at Northway had been taken seriously and I was loving every minute of it!

Stay tuned for my next instalment!

Thor Williams

13971186

Curtin Bentley 

PR in the Church...

Northway Christian Centre, located in the urban suburb of Girrawheen, is the 'church' that I am referring to. It is also in fact, my place of employment...

My name is Thor Williams and I am finishing my bachelor of Commerce- double major in Marketing and Public Relations at Curtin, Bentley. I have been employed at Northway for almost a year in an entirely different role- Youth Pastor. Over the last 10 weeks I have dedicated myself to fulfilling PR and communications roles within my church/organisation and it has been thrilling to say the least! It has been such a refreshing time in my life to finally put my studies to hand (not that I don't like working with teenagers, I love them!). So, after almost finishing my PR placement role at Northway, I thought it was time to share a few of my thoughts which I will be bringing to you through this post and more to come...

Northway Christian Centre is located in a very urban and low socio-economic suburb. The church itself has been prevalent in the area since 1973 and has had a huge impact on its direct community and WA as a whole. In spite of the churches previous successes, modern communication is lacking, and this is where I have been put to good use! The church is currently going through a re-branding stage whilst internal communications, employee branding and a new website for the organisation's public's are currently being developed as you read this. As you can tell, my PR Professional Practice unit could not have come at a better time!

Some of the tasks which I have focused on over my duration in my new role, are communicating with the web design company and being the direct liaison with them, internal communications, employee branding, developing new vision and mission statements (coinciding the new Senior Pastor's leadership), looking for sponsorship and creating a new welcome flyer to say the least.

My first week consisted of getting used to the idea of less devotion to my usual tasks of managing teenagers, counselling, running high school programs, running our weekly program etc. and focusing on PR related activities. As the new website is the most important task on my 'To-Do' list, I contacted the web design company and discussed what needed to be done on my end as well as their end. I then ventured on to seek internal and external sponsorship for a monthly newsletter which should be launched around June this year. It was an amazing week, and one that felt quite strange. I was still working with the same organisation, the same peers, the same office... but in a completely different role!

My experience in the last 10 weeks has truly been eye-opening...I'll touch base with you shortly as I post up my next instalment from my placement experience at Northway Christian Centre.

Ciao,

Thor Williams

13971186

Bentley