After the expiration of my term as a Presenter Prep team leader with TEDxUGA, an idea-driven conference licensed by TED, I looked for new ways to get involved with the organization. In 2015, I joined the TEDxUGA Student Executive Board as Media Relations Director. This role complemented my degree in Public Relations perfectly, and I worked with the Promotion and Social Media directors to give TEDxUGA a strong identity in the Athens community and beyond.
Over the three and a half years I have currently served as Media Relations director, I successfully procured 11+ pieces of news coverage in Athens publications and beyond. This position involved a variety of PR skills, including building/updating a bulletproof media list, countless pitches, weekly collaborative board meetings, and assisting in the development of an annual report sent to all TEDxUGA stakeholders.
What I did right:
- During my first year, I successfully pitched the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, the region’s biggest publisher.
- Many of the reporters I worked with were either students or novices, and I made sure that both parties in the interviews I coordinated had relevant, accurate information and felt comfortable.
- The media list I created featured every publication in every medium, both in Athens and the surrounding communities.
What I did wrong:
- After creating the media list, I developed unrealistic expectations of how many outlets would provide coverage and assumed that those who covered it once would cover it every year.
- During the second year, I relied on a rich visual pitch send en masse, which was not adequately tailored and failed to develop ongoing conversations.
What I learned:
- As any PR job will teach you, it is impossible to completely control what is written about your organization. In a student market especially, wrong information, unprofessionalism, and even misspellings are par for the course.
- Moving up in any organization can distance you from everyday interaction with the group’s main activities. As someone who felt so passionately about the development of TEDxUGA talks, it was both rewarding to share that passion as a director and and painful to be a level removed.
Over the three and a half years I have currently served as Media Relations Director, I successfully procured 11+ pieces of news coverage in Athens publications and beyond. This position involved a variety of PR skills, including building/updating a bulletproof media list, countless pitches, weekly collaborative board meetings, and assisting in the development of an annual report sent to all TEDxUGA stakeholders.
What I did right:
- During my first year, I successfully pitched the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, the region’s biggest publisher.
- Many of the reporters I worked with were either students or novices, and I made sure that both parties in the interviews I coordinated had relevant, accurate information and felt comfortable.
- The media list I created featured every publication in every medium, both in Athens and the surrounding communities.
What I did wrong:
- After creating the media list, I developed unrealistic expectations of how many outlets would provide coverage and assumed that those who covered it once would cover it every year.
- During the second year, I relied on a rich visual pitch send en masse, which was not adequately tailored and failed to develop ongoing conversations.
What I learned:
- As any PR job will teach you, it is impossible to completely control what is written about your organization. In a student market especially, wrong information, unprofessionalism, and even misspellings are par for the course.
- Moving up in any organization can distance you from everyday interaction with the group’s main activities. As someone who felt so passionately about the development of TEDxUGA talks, it was both rewarding to share that passion as a director and and painful to be a level removed.