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