Guess who got the job?

Hi everyone!

I was holding off until my last blog post to deliver my incredibly good news! Before my placement supervisor left (which was incredibly sad for team and I) she told me I'd been recommended for her role as Public Relations and Bequests Officer. By this point I only had two or three weeks of interning left at Guide Dogs WA.

Not wanting to get my hopes up, I calmly went about my regular business. 'Lo and behold, a week later I'm having a meeting with the executive manager of philanthropy. Fast forward two-and-a-half weeks and I'm leaving my interview with HR. They were going to make me an offer.

Two days later the offer pops in to my inbox: I can work part time until classes were over. I happily accept, because this is basically the perfect job: it's for a great cause, the communications team are amazing and I've already been acquainted with the organisation for long enough to be comfortable in accepting a bigger role.

Well, now that classes are over - I'm a full time PR Officer! The Internship process worked - but it wasn't as simple as all that!

The beginning of 2015, when I completed the HBF Run for a Reason blindfolded for Guide Dogs WA

Of course, it took a little extra curricular work to get my amazing internship. Re-wind to the beginning of the year when I was accepted into the John Curtin Leadership Academy. We'd been on camp, deciding which community project we would choose to work on, when this project from Guide Dogs WA popped up.

The task was to recruit a number of runners for Guide Dogs WA in the upcoming HBF Run for a Reason. A group of six, some of whom you can see above, eagerly grabbed this chance to volunteer with Guide Dogs WA.

During my volunteering, I managed to talk the organisation into giving me a rare PR internship. With a bit of luck and lots of campaigning for my own cause, it came through.

The moral of this story is it can take some extra work to get the graduate job. Oh, and if you're interested in joining the John Curtin Leadership Academy, apply here and tell them Elena sent you!


See you guys in the PR game

 - Elena

Evaluation is key: finding evaluative data in strange places

Throughout units at Curtin, the importance of evaluating PR is stressed time and time again.

Evaluate, evaluate, evaluate!

Whether you're trying to measure relationships, experiences, or the specific value of media coverage, evaluating is important to the practise. Just to recap, here's why:

Image via Flickr / Creative Commons / janneke staaks

1. Gaining solid quantitative or qualitative data
2. Justifying budget and expenditure
3. Understanding real-life stakeholder perceptions

The first two tie together; when communicating the impact of PR to upper management, it's only logical to have solid data backing up your claims. This is especially relevant when justifying expenditure, proving why you deserve the current budget, or applying for a larger budget.

However, in the real world, solid data is rarely recorded from public relations activities. The team responsible know what worked and what didn't, what they'll try again soon and what they'll dump - but how they arrived at these conclusions won't be based on cold, hard facts. Instead, it'll be based on gut feeling. 

But don't despair just yet - you may find what you're looking for in strange places. Say, outside the public relations or communications department.

Being part of an organisation that is so large can be daunting. At VisAbility, which houses Guide Dogs WA (where my placement is located), the services are vast. You'll find Occupational Therapists, Assistive Technology professionals and Guide Dog Puppy trainers working under the same roof.

If you think PR is only happening within the communications team, you're sorely mistaken. A large part of PR is stakeholder relations, and the managers of each department are naturally highly attentive to their individual stakeholders' needs. 

Recently, an event run by two VisAbility social workers proved to be a fantastic PR exercise. The social workers wanted to make their clients feel special, so they organised a pampering day trip. Each client was given free spa treatments and hours to engage in issues-based dialogue within their own small community as they enjoyed free food platters, beauty masks, pedicures and therapeutic massages. The organisation sponsoring the treatments indicated a commitment to ongoing events as well as offering a generous donation. Photos were taken of everyone enjoying their days of pampering - and each was sent a survey to fill out. 

From this event, which was organised without 'official' PR input, the social workers managed to improve stakeholder relations, gain community support, create an issued-based dialogue, generate a mutually beneficial partnership and gain quantitative and qualitative data. If we hadn't looked, we might have missed it - but the perfect PR data package was sitting right under our noses. All we had to do was look in the right direction.

Stay tuned for my next (and last) blog post! It will feature a rather exciting announcement...

- Elena

Evaluation In Action.

We have been taught since our first year studying PR about the importance of evaluation in strategic planning. Evaluation acts as a way to see the effectiveness of a project and allows you to see if original objectives have been achieved.

I have been fortunate enough in my time at Momentum Forum Events to be a part of evaluating. Early on in my internship I was tasked with sending personalised invitations for an event to Momentum’s existing contact list. However, there were lots of contact lists and ensuring invitations were not sent out multiple times to the same person was becoming an issue. So we decided that in order to save time and become more efficient in the future, we would type up and place all the contacts in alphabetical order as well as separating them into contacts for each event. Now when sending out invitations for the Men In Black Ball, I see how much more effective the new system has become.

Similarly when updating Momentum’s social media pages we pay particular attention to how well the updates are received online. By looking in detail at what was posted in the past that did and did not work we are able to see the best types of posts to write, the best time of day to post it and exactly who to target. Making sure social media is evaluated is a really important way to see if the audience is receiving the information. If the audience is not being reached, it is not working and objectives won’t be reached.

Old logo

Recently, Momentum has started revitalising their image as a whole and it has been such a great project to be a part of. The reason for the update is simply to bring the company image into the “now”.  The company logo was the first aspect to get an update. The old logo had been used for many years and no longer reflected the quality of the company and the events that Momentum holds. Therefore the aim of choosing a new logo was both to update the image and also to reflect the quality of the company. The logo chosen brings Momentum into the now as well as showing the audience the kind of company Momentum is: An events management company that holds five star events.

So far the new logo has been used in the current media release and the new sponsorship proposal. The

Updated logo

sponsorship proposal is another area that has been updated. When sending out sponsorships recently we realised that the proposal no longer accurately reflected what Momentum could offer. So before we went any further with reaching out to sponsors we stopped, rearranged our plans for the day and revised the document.

Being able to experience evaluation in action has been such an important aspect of my internship. I have learnt that in order to move forward in any project you need to understand whether what you are doing is working and if it is not, how you can go about making it work.

Until next time!

Kiara Bonasera

15523055

Curtin Bentley

We can do it! Lets maintain the PR legacy

Hi everyone. So my last blog discussed the different forms that PR takes within the company where I am doing my placement. The Communications team I am mostly sitting with is newly developed, so there are still many PR functions being performed by many other different positions within the company. I have been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to ‘float’ between the different departments to see what other PR activities take place in the agency and be able to group it all together under a PR umbrella that I can identify thanks to all my studies. It seems the reason there has not previously been one dedicated PR role for the whole agency is that the company is a sales organisation; any role that is not considered as profit earning has thus traditionally been seen as a cost. This has been big lesson number 2 in consolidating a large portion of our learning about the PR function; it must always be measurable through monitoring and evaluation! The benefits of a PR function, within private industry focussed on profits, can then be really justified; even in the eyes of the most sceptical bottom-line driven MD! My prac placement is showing me how crucial it is for PR to prove its worth (and as quickly as possible!) particularly within a profit driven organisation! The good news is that the emergence of the new Communications role within this sales organisation is an indication of a new trend as I discussed in my last blog. Despite how far PR has come....I think we all still need to work hard to show people just what we are made of, and the possibilities of PR. And we can absolutely do it!

Thanks for reading :)

Sarah Harrison
Curtin Bentley