#managingpr

[kayleypeters91]

The Pitch

    The day has finally come – it’s assessment day! The other group pitched their ideas in response to our brief first. The main focus of the brief we had set can be found in my post ‘The Brief.’ (http://kayleypeters.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/the-brief/). But to summarise, the main objective was to change the behaviour of 18-25 year olds in relation to sexual health.

    I really liked the other group’s ideas; they had thought of using well known characters ‘The Inbetweeners’: always ending up in awkward situations, often to do with sex. Many people would be likely to relate to some aspect of each of the characters and their different personalities. They would be travelling the UK in one of the characters well known yellow car communicating the message to the target audience. Using these particular characters would show a sense of humour but also get the message across effectively.

    Set in our brief was the objective “to remove some of the taboo element surrounding the subject”, the idea of an NHS telephone line was suggested. This was a more serious idea, which I thought would be extremely beneficial. It was to be anonymous and people who used the line would be able to ask questions and tell of their concerns to a relevant person who would then be able to provide help. The fact that it would be anonymous meant that people didn’t have to feel embarrassed or ashamed when revealing their concerns, which I thought met the objective.

    Along with good ideas came good presenting skills. I felt each of them spoke clearly and answered any questions very well. No-one used any notes, which to me, showed that they were confident in what they were talking about. The only minor issues that I found were that one group member in this group was often reading from the screen rather than keeping eye contact and talking directly to our group; and another at one point had hands in their pockets, which in my opinion, looks uncomfortable and unprofessional. One final point being that in our brief we stated that we wanted to see a visual presentation as well as a written document including all the main points, the latter they did not provide.

    When it came to pitching our ideas to Ministry of Print, I feel that our group did an excellent job. In order to present effectively Business Balls (2012) suggests that “good preparation is the key to confidence, which is the key to you being relaxed, and this settles the butterflies.” I very much agree with this suggestion; each of us in the group had studied our own individual parts for the presentation, and as a result I think we did feel more relaxed and confident when presenting. I think that if you have a clear understanding of the subject matter and a good idea which points need to be covered, you will feel much better about presenting to an audience.

    During our presentation we had considered feedback from previous presentations and tried not to make the same mistakes again. I felt that we worked well together as a team to provide an informative presentation that met the brief we were set. There was only one minor flaw; we had decided to create mood boards rather than rely solely on a Powerpoint presentation but one group member had forgotten to bring theirs with them. But we overcame this by explaining the idea in more detail. When it came to answering questions, each of us was able to answer or add something at least once, which meant we all had an equal opportunity; there was no allocated person specifically for questions. The only issue I found was that I had thought I may have been able to answer any questions that came up relating to the specific slides I had talked about. However, I did find that one member in our group was a slightly quicker thinker than myself so I didn’t always have chance to do this. But I was able to support their answers.

    Strengths of our group were the results of the Belbin test; with all members having some element of a ‘teamworker’ in their personality it was obvious no-one was going to put themselves forward as a ‘leader.’ There were no major constraints and although we were a very relaxed and casual group, work was always prepared and carried out on time and to a high standard. From working as part of this group, I have to say, I didn’t really notice any major weaknesses. Perhaps the only one being that sometimes we got distracted and a little carried away with the task in hand. 

[kayleypeters91]

Response to brief

    Following on from my previous post, (http://kayleypeters.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/the-brief/), we were lucky our presentation generated plenty of relevant discussion and the group responding to our brief appeared to understand what was required of them. In reference to the Shannon and Weaver Model of Communication (1949) the other group had decoded our message correctly, and I couldn’t wait to see what ideas they’d come up with.

    The brief presented to us was by a company named ‘Ministry of Print’; they produce and sell personalised merchandise at various festivals across the UK. They wanted help from a PR agency to achieve the objectives of;

Increasing awareness of their brand and website

Encouraging the purchase of products before attending the festivals

Branching out into other major festivals

    If I’m honest, the last objective “to branch out into other major festivals” didn’t strike me as something a PR agency would be able to help them with. First, surely it would be up to them to decide which festivals these ‘major’ festivals would be. Second, isn’t this all about the money you’ve got to buy your place at festivals? And finally, it wasn’t exactly the best SMART objective I’d ever heard. But we proceeded anyway.

    With a target audience of 18-25 year olds it was suggested that we take the social media route for this task. Ideas were flown around between the four of us and a few were selected to develop further. We decided we would focus on one idea for each of the objectives; an online viral video was the idea for the objective “to increase awareness of the brand and website” as well as celebrity endorsement, and a competition was thought up for the objective “to encourage purchases before attending the festival.”

    It was a group decision to go down a more creative route of using mood boards rather than relying solely on a Powerpoint presentation for these two ideas. The idea of the viral video was to show images of people enjoying themselves at festivals wearing personalised merchandise by Ministry of Print; it was also to include positive comments from existing customers and a link to the Ministry of Print website. The idea of celebrity endorsement was to send free samples of merchandise using direct mail, rather than standard post, to those who are popular with the 18-25 year old target audience such as radio presenters and reality stars.  We hoped they would then use Twitter to publicly say ‘thank you’ to @Ministryof Print, generating awareness. The idea of the competition was to use the hash tag ‘Mydreamfestival’ on Twitter and have people commenting what their dream festival would be. Then, everyone who comments would be entered into a competition to win a variety of prizes. As interesting as this may sound, a weakness from previous group meetings returned. Again thoughts began to stray from what we were actually supposed to be doing: rather than focusing on the objectives set in the brief, the focus became on the detail of the prizes. As a result it did take some time to finalise our ideas.

    Once our focus returned we were able to concentrate on allocating the rather minute budget of £3,500 we had been given. It will come as no surprise that the majority of the budget was spent on the prizes for the competition. But we were able to spend the entire budget appropriately considering the postage of the free samples as well as paying the professional we were to hire to create the viral video.

    Although sometimes we were distracted, I felt that overall we worked to a very good standard as a team. I felt we were more than prepared to pitch our ideas to the other team, and was actually looking forward to it!

References

Communication Theory., (2012) Shannon and Weaver Model of Communication [online]. Available from http://communicationtheory.org/shannon-and-weaver-model-of-communication/ (Accessed 25 March 2012)

[kayleypeters91]

The Brief

    Outlined in my previous post (http://kayleypeters.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/the-assessment-2/) was the task for the ‘Managing Public Relations’ module here at the University of Lincoln.

    We were to represent the local council, health service and university with concerns relating to the rise in sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) amongst 18-25 year olds throughout the UK. The primary objective was to develop advocates for change in behaviour amongst young people; more simply, we wanted to persuade young people to have safe sex to prevent them catching STDs, including Chlamydia. Labs Direct (2012) say Chlamydia is “the highest growing infection in theUK” with “over 160,000 cases in 2010.” 

    Given quite a mature topic, I wanted to continue with the task in that way: maturely. Unfortunately others didn’t really see it like that; there were a few giggles and looks of discomfort as STDs aren’t an everyday topic of discussion. Once the discomfort had been overcome ideas began to flow, but not in the right direction.

    The group became enthusiastic but thoughts began to steer away from the task in hand; proposed ideas began to focus on us planning the campaign instead of focusing on our objectives. As a result, a group meeting was to be held as soon as possible in order to clearly identify what the objectives of the campaign were and to begin developing our brief. We wanted the group receiving our brief to understand exactly what they were to do and to communicate with them as though they were already part of our team.

    Stone (1995: 11) suggests four principles to consider when communicating with staff:

Identify your primary audience – the group we were presenting our brief to.

Talk specifically and directly to each individual in your primary audience – when presenting our brief we planned to make as much eye contact as possible with each member of the audience; we didn’t want to focus all our attention on one or two specific people.

Make sure they know exactly what you want them to do – we tried to be as specific as possible in our brief in order for the other group to have an excellent understanding of us (the client) as well as what we wanted them to do.

Match the message to the media - wanting the other group to present their own ideas for the campaign we did not give them a specific media channel to use. Was this the best idea?

    Discussion out of the way we were able to focus and function effectively as a team. We used “individual skills to work towards the same goal” (Harrison, 2000:119), something I am very happy we were able to do as it showed commitment towards the task. We each carried out secondary research based on questions we had previously asked ourselves; mainly researching facts and figures relating to sexual health in the 18-25 year old age category. The team cooperated well when delegated tasks; one person wrote the brief, another converted the brief into a visual presentation, and another continued with research; the other was able to provide some excellent ideas and opinions. 

    I felt we were off to a flying start as we managed to get so much completed to what we considered, if I do say so myself, a pretty good standard. A lot of effort was being put into the task, communication was flowing and most importantly, all group members were turning up to meetings – something that doesn’t tend to happen with every group. Perhaps I was expecting too much, but this all came crashing down when we met to rehearse our presentation.

    Each choosing two slides to make notes on, we should have been ready to rehearse at the next meeting; it turns out some members of the group are quite indecisive. The time was spent doing the preparation that should have been done beforehand. Thinking ahead it was suggested to meet half an hour before our presentation to ensure it was of an adequate time length. Having a lecture at 9am before the presentation the response was ‘I’ll struggle to get out of bed.’ Not the attitude to expect from a group of people hoping to do well, although, we are students after all…..

  References

Harrison, S., (2000) Public Relations: An Introduction 2nd ed. Thomas Learning

Labs Direct, (2012) STI Statistics [online]. Available from: http://www.labsdirect.com/uk/sti-statistics.html (Accessed 19 March 2012)

Stone, N., (1995) The Management and Practice of Public Relations Macmillan Press Ltd: London

[kayleypeters91]

The Assessment

    So, today’s the day – the day the group assessment was officially set. At first glance the details slightly confused me as I was unsure what it was we were actually supposed to be doing. But Jane was able to remove this confusion by taking the seminar group step by step through the stages required. Once I’d eventually gotten my head around it, the tasks actually seemed like fun; I know what you’re thinking, an assessment being fun, really?!

    First, with the details provided, we were to create a brief explaining who we were, what we wanted the PR consultancy to do for us, and how we wanted them to do it. We were then to formally exchange briefs and respond to the brief given to us by the other group. This was to be done in the form of a pitch, which may have included presenting who we are as a PR consultancy, what our previous campaigns consisted of, and our ideas for their particular campaign. But before any of this could happen we were to split up into groups.

    That dreaded task of choosing group members had once again come back to bite. Not in a negative way however; the problem was that everyone in the seminar group really didn’t mind who they were to work with for the task. When an awkward silence began to exist, Jane thought of a creative, yet simple and fair way of putting us into our groups: the style of picking numbers out of a hat. I chose a scrap of paper with the number ‘two’ written on it and joined the others that had also done this.                        

    I was very pleased with the other three members of my group, if not feeling lucky, as there was one member of the seminar group I didn’t particularly wish to work with due to previous negative experiences of working with them. Three of the group members I was also working with for another module, so had a very good idea of what to expect from them. And as a result, my expectations were very high. I knew what they were capable of and expected them to put as much effort as they put into other tasks into this one. The final member I had not worked with before, but after completing the Belbin Test in a previous seminar, it was revealed that they were a Completer-Finisher, just like me. According to Belbin, characteristics of a Completer-Finisher include being “painstaking, orderly, conscientious, and anxious.” They are “invaluable where tasks demand close concentration and a high degree of accuracy.” Due to this I felt positive that this person would deliver some excellent ideas and also that our work for each task would be finished to perfection (or thereabouts!)  Other group members’ results from the test were Team Worker: “socially orientated, rather mild and sensitive” and Shaper: “highly strung, outgoing, and dynamic.”

    The group had a variety of skills and it was quite clear that certain people would be better at certain aspects of the tasks than others. We knew that our skills needed to be put into good use in order to do well in this task.     

   So … Let the work begin!