Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Public Relations training

Hardly exciting work developing training material for Public Relations but I've finally managed to get my act together. I was working with a local community college on a joint venture of sorts to get a PR course of the ground.

The course was targeted at new entrepreneurs in and around the Soweto area. Many of these young minds have the talent and ideas but when it comes to marketing and execution their skills are lacking. We divided the material into two parts - one that focused on developing the basic marketing skills through the use of case studies.

The second part of the course was much tougher to develop. We wanted a practical component to the course that addresses local issues that the young entrepreneurs would face. Challenges included securing funding, understanding practically how purchasing media space works, tracking an monitoring of campaigns, and finally the basics of actual creative design and branding. I'm off on vacation for a while soon and will teach the first run of the course in May - it was tough to develop but I think it's going to be much more fun to teach!