Week 9!
This week we were asked to read Chapter 13 of the textbook which was about Sponsorship and Event Management.
This week's readings made me think of all the times on the news or in the newspaper that I've seen a CEO of a major company handing over one of those huge cheques to a charitable organisation or donating money to a hospital or something. I've never before considered (before starting this course) how much PR planning goes into such a situation.
Event Management is an area of PR that I am particularly interested in. Events need to be carefully planned and executed, and are planned using the steps of feasibility, planning, execution and evaluation. This also made me think of my PR tutorial a few weeks ago in which we were looking up Golden Target Awards. Many of these involved sponsoring an organization or managing an event. They all did it well, and I reflected on these case studies while reading the textbook this week.
Sponsorship involves a high level of research, planning, scheduling and creativity to ensure that both organisations involved gain benefit from the relationship. Different types of sponsorship include philanthropic and corporate.
The readings made me think more about PR theory/ practice in that when managing an event, a PR practitioner must ensure that the event "not only fulfills the aims and strategies of the organization or sponsor but also attract the attention of the media". In other words, if the CEO of your company hands a big cheque to a charity and no media is there to see it or write about it, the relationship is not mutually beneficial, although I'm sure the charity would still be very happy :)
2 comments:
Kristen, I liked how you highlighted the examples from the Golden Target Awards as exemplifying instances where a successful PR campaign can be derived from the implementation of sponsorship agreements. I agree that the plethora of planning that must be ubiquitous with PR/sponsorship events is often disguised from the target public, maybe because there could be months of organization/planning going into a half day event, for instance, and for that reason the importance of that ribbon cutting/hospital opening as part of a strategic PR plan perhaps isn’t widely recognised. You also echo the point from the readings that there needs to be a mutually beneficial relationship between sponsor and beneficiary for the sponsorship to even exist, let alone have a chance of perpetuity! This, I believe, is the primary responsibility of the PR practitioner- to make the money/goods/services expended as part of the sponsorship arrangement work for their organization, either generate goodwill, sales, exposure etc.
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