I am very happy to say that I’ve finished my Public Relations Apprenticeship with success for both myself and the person I worked with. I had worked with Ali Helnwein, a composer of string and woodwind instruments, who is a person I’ve worked with on two previous apprenticeships. This time I got to help Ali’s band, Demo-Team, hold a fundraiser that included performances from the band, photos, and refreshments to help them finalize production on their second album. We had little time to get the event together and a lot of actions needed to be put into place for the event to work.

How did I pull such an event off? I simply used the information included in both the Public Relations course pack and the Planning course pack. I did fact-finding on the event, set up the time and location of the event, worked out what we were going to communicate to the public we were inviting and what we would communicate to them during the event, etc. and put it all into a program. This program included every single step that needed to occur along with who needed to perform those steps. This way the person executing the steps wouldn’t be wondering what they had to do next or question if he was even doing the thing in sequence.

This data made putting together the event a cinch, both for me and the band. I went to the event when it was held and we got over 30 people to come, and we had only a week to promote and put it together. We also raised over $400 which brought Demo-Team even closer to accomplishing their goal. In fact, after the performance Demo-Team had raised enough money to finalize their album production. This was amazing to hear and increased my faith in this very simple technology. I am absolutely confident in my ability to establish good public relations with the community for any group and put together successful plans so that they themselves become successful too.

-Alex Edwards