Tag Archives: Professional development

Let me make this perfectly clear…

…I’m proud of my students! They worked really hard on our fundraiser!

Did they raise $5,000? Nope. Did we have a huge crowd? Nope. But I really didn’t expect that as this was the first time we’d used this particular format.

I did, however, fail to remember what our speaker said this morning…”A leader’s primary function is keeping hope alive.” So if you think my last post was about my students not listening or not taking the advice of others or not performing well, you’re wrong.

My earlier blog post was aimed specifically at Faculty Advisers. The ones who expect and demand perfection from students. The ones who would do everything themselves in order to ensure they raised $5,000 and had 150 people in attendance. I’ve seen it happen too many times and it bothers me greatly!

The purpose of this blog is to help make the difficult job of advising PRSSA Chapters a little easier. The message I intended to send this morning was that our profession can’t afford for we advisers to grab the reins every time we think things aren’t going perfectly. Having the courage to sometimes stand by and let things run their course is an extremely important part of growing leaders, IMHO. So is encouraging them to learn from the lessons provided by that course.

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Using a blog as the Chapter website

The OU PRSSA chapter has started using a blog as our Chapter website…please check out ouprssa.wordpress.com. After months of frustration over not being able to update the website linked to our College (we still had the 2009 officers posted), we knew we needed to do something. But let me back up a bit, first.

This summer, I had the opportunity to teach a course on media relations, which included field trips to speak with public relations practitioners and journalists about what it took to build and maintain an excellent relationship with each other. Thanks to Evan Handy, one of my students in the class, we were able to schedule an audience with Damon Gardenhire, Director of Communication for the Oklahoma Department of Education (ODOE). During his presentation, Gamon mentioned that he no longer used a website to disseminate information and see feedback. His new strategy was to use a blog, because according to him it was easier to update, everything could be archived in one place and stakeholder feedback was easier to gather. Also, every news release, statement or media advisory became the news feed.

Serendipitously, I saw several articles indicating that this was becoming more and more prevalent in the industry. So, armed with this information and the consent of the executive committee, I pointed our Webmaster in this direction. Within a week, without ANY training, she had us up and running. It’s pretty plain right now, but at least the officers are current and we’ve got greater capacity to provide much more content to our members than ever before.

I’m not getting paid for this, honest! But it can certainly make your life easier if you go the blog route.

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