In PR we love CSR – when it is done right. We can make compelling stories about businesses acting responsibly, choosing ethical suppliers and making business decisions that have the needs of the community (local or global) at their heart. Apple recently hit the news with their announcement that they had been reviewing their supply chain to ensure all employees in a variety of geographies are treated equitably. Admittedly they did this after facing pressure from activist groups and the media which lessened the impact of their action. If, as a global business they had done this proactively it would have made a strong, PR-able story for the business, and, more importantly, won them the respect of their customers.

CSR should mean more than the odd charitable donation or staff shed-painting expedition. Don’t get me wrong, we love the odd bit of PR fluff here at Orchard towers, but we are much happier (and we get better results) when dealing with something that effects real change within a business environment.

Here are my tweets from the event:

@chrischilton

At #csr seminar – 38% of consumers will pay more for socially responsible products or services…

@chrischilton

360 registered charities in Guernsey – seems like quite a lot? #csr

@chrischilton

#csr strategies need to think big, be long term and focus on sustainability not just short term quick wins.

@chrischilton

#csr is not always about money? Can be time, knowledge or facilities. But in most businesses those things cost money?

@chrischilton

#csr activity is very useful for #pr but #pr should not be the only reason you are doing something.

Posted by Chris.

Steve: 2012 will be a year when marketing budgets face a further squeeze as corporate belts are tightened further; we’ll have to work even harder to demonstrate the value that good PR delivered by professional practitioners can add in difficult economic times.

Harry: I’m looking forward to studying towards my CIPR Diploma in 2012. I’ll be dusting off my PR books and getting in the swing of writing essays again!

Brooke: Next year I am looking forward to some more fab events launching some new brands (shhhh can’t tell you about them yet!) into Guernsey and Guernsey Festival is going to rock, I just know it is going to feature in my PR highlights for 2012.  Oh did I mention I am getting married… I think my wedding is going to be a pretty big personal PR event for me!!

Pieter: I am looking forward to gaining more experience with the team at Orchard, assisting them with a wide variety of tasks and projects and putting my media skills to good use whenever I can.

Chloe: I am desperate to get started on a PR qualification! I am currently about half way to getting a degree with the Open University which I am really enjoying. I’m really looking forward to taking on something industry specific though and building on the knowledge that I have acquired as an account executive.

Emma: I am looking forward to conducting more media and presentation skills training. I think 2012 will also be the year that our clients will really get to grips with how the media has changed. By their nature, professional services firms are not known for being early adopters but the wave of proof demonstrating how useful social media is can no longer be ignored. I am looking forward to helping them get the best out of these new communication channels.

So there you have it – 2012 will be about big events, the wedding of the year, developing new skills and showing clients that PR delivers value for money. We expect it’s going to be a busy year.

Posted by Chris.

This year our Christmas video starred Adie, Cat, Chloe, Harry and John and was directed and edited by Pieter.

The Orchard team have come up with our three highlights for 2011, showing what is good, bad, and frankly quite weird in the world of PR this year.

First of all, let’s look at the ‘good’. Steve and Cat both suggested the Royal Wedding, which as well as being a good old fashioned knees up for much of the country, was a lesson in absolutely impeccable media and public relations. According to Steve (who knows a thing or two about dealing with Royals) “Paddy Harverson, the director of communications at Clarence House, has done an amazing job in managing the profile of The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall since 2004. The Royal Wedding this year of Prince William and Kate Middleton was a PR masterpiece, combining tradition and ceremony with modern popular touches – and a nice classic car!”

Not everyone had such a good year though, and our resident Aussie Emma had to bring up the ‘pyjama disaster’ at Qantas. As Emma says, if you want an example of bad PR from 2011 “it has to be the Qantas debacle.” She goes on: “Launching a social media campaign a week after the airline grounded its fleet was mind-boggling. Qantas asked users to use the hashtag #QantasLuxury to describe what their “dream luxury inflight experience” would be. Angry and sarcastic Twitter posts flooded Twitter. It was the wrong campaign to be launching at a time when there was an on-going industrial relations dispute with its workers. Lessons should be learned – this was a great example of the power of social media and why PR should not be done in isolation from the rest of the business.”

And finally… No year would be complete without a range of baffling PR stunts gaining coverage despite all norms of taste and decency. While we liked the giant slipper our pick of the year goes to ‘Baby Gaga’, an ice-cream made from human breast milk.

As Harry explains: “Baby Gaga was one of the most out-there stunts of the year. The ice-cream, made from human breast milk, managed to create a number of international headlines for the ice-cream shop in Covent Garden that launched it. It stayed in the news for several days, and caused a lot of controversy even though Westminster Council was reported to have confiscated it amid concerns over safety.

So there you have it: a royal wedding, airline pyjamas and human breast milk ice-cream. Don’t let anyone ever tell you that PR work isn’t varied.

Posted by Chris.

First up the team have been thinking about their personal experiences, and we’ll be finishing off the year with more posts on our PR industry highlights (and lowlights) and a look forward to 2012.

So what have the best bits of 2011 been for Orchard PR?

Brooke: The Waitrose branch openings, all five of them, were a PR highlight for me.  The stakeholder parties that we organised were hard work but brilliant fun – seeing The Farmhouse and La Mare Vineyards transformed and hundreds of eager guests arriving to find bespoke Guernsey and Jersey themed cocktails and Heston and Delia inspired food creations was amazing.

Steve: I’ve enjoyed working with some well-known grandmasters of the media such as Alastair Stewart and Robert Peston, but also some relatively unknown, yet impressive, journalists in the trade press and local media.

Chloe: I can’t believe I have only been at Orchard nine months, so many great things have happened. The one day that particularly stands out is the one I just could not stop grinning – I was so excited when I got to type “Conde Nast” into my contacts.

Pieter: Filming and editing the videos for the Foster Care Campaign was the highlight for me. It is such a worthwhile project and I was pleased to be able to use my skills to be help young people in Guernsey find a foster family.

Harry: Meeting Judge Jules at Fusion Nightclub! I co-ordinated all of his media interviews and he was really friendly, even letting Chloe and I have a photo taken with him. His set was amazing and the Orchard PR crew partied until the Fusion house lights came on.

Catherine: Personally, achieving a distinction for my CIPR Advanced Certificate and being promoted to senior account executive were my best moments of 2011. I think they show that I’ve made some pretty big strides in my PR career this year.

Emma: The Orchard team won six new clients in the space of two months near the end of the year which just shows that, even in uncertain economic times, people recognise the need to use specialists in communications to make their voices heard by the right people.

Come back to the Orchard Blog tomorrow for our top PR industry highlights of 2011.

Posted by Chris.

Significantly however both speakers focused not on how amazing technology is, or how clever you can be with social media but rather on the people using social media. It’s part of their everyday lives, it’s useful and it’s fun. Businesses have to recognise that fact first of all before they can hope to devise a social media strategy that can bring them some benefits. The consensus (amongst the main speakers anyway) was that the key thing to recognise about social media is that it is a fundamental change in the way we communicate, not in the actual physical act of communication being online rather than in person, or through the media, but the way we act and react. Communication in a social media world is not a one way street – listening, as well as talking, is a vital skill.

Too many businesses spend too much time talking and broadcasting and not enough time listening to their customers, seeing what they are doing, seeing what they want and engaging with them on that level.

In terms of convincing Channel Island’s businesses that they should be making more concerted efforts in this area, the presence of Nick Masters will have persuaded a lot of people. To see a big four accountancy firm advocating the use of social in their business plan was great, and Nick had some very positive things to say about the benefits of a social approach to communication, both for the business and for their 150,000 employees.

My favourite comment of the day came from Nick who said having a static website with no social integration and no strategy for engaging communities was like pitching a tent outside Disneyland and expecting people to just come out and play with you. Social media is about jumping in and getting involved, communicating with your peers and listening to what they have to say. If you understand them better, understand their motivations and expectations better, you can provide a better service to them in the long run.

Posted by Chris.

Having graduated from Portsmouth University in summer 2009 with a degree in media studies I had already made peace with the fact that I would probably never end up with a job in the fiercely competitive media industry and that my degree would be the last qualification on my CV.

Thanks to a combination of good timing and persistence however I managed to get a couple of key breaks and, after a brief stint working as a broadcast journalist, Orchard PR welcomed me with open arms in March 2010.

I soon found out that whilst my studies gave me some of the right skills to succeed, my first six months at Orchard as an account executive were a real eye opener as I learnt very quickly how a busy PR consultancy operates. My organisation and time management skills improved a lot and my confidence was quickly given a boost by the supportive team who pushed me to stretch myself in the early days.

Alongside the frantic pace of on-the-job learning it was made clear from day one that I would be undertaking professional qualifications in PR. Everyone at Orchard is a member of the CIPR, we even have a Fellow in the office. Those of us newbies in the industry start with the Advanced Certificate, and I began mine in October 2010.

The course aims to give a solid grounding in all the key concepts, techniques and skills needed to develop effectively as a PR practitioner. I studied the course online through the PR Academy which consisted of live webinars and two training days in London.  It provided a great opportunity to meet likeminded professionals and share experiences of working in the industry.

Assessment is based on two essays which require students to get to grips with PR theory and then pull it apart and analyse and critique it and a planning assignment which is probably the most practical part of the course. It calls on students to write their own PR campaign based on a case study thinking about aims and objectives, strategy and tactics and evaluation. It is safe to say that after completing that assignment I would never want the task to manage a real life PR campaign for bottled tap water!

As the course is online it requires a certain amount of discipline as much of the study is independent. Therefore after a full day in the office I would often have to go home and hit the books if I wanted to keep up with the curriculum. However the teams at the PR Academy and at Orchard were very supportive; my tutors were very responsive and Orchard gave me study leave time to complete important assignments and attend the workshops in London.

The course certainly lived up to its billing and I have come away a much more confident PR professional. I have learnt to think much more strategically when approaching client matters because I know about the different models available to practitioners when planning. I feel I now have a deeper understanding of the industry as a whole and I’m aware of the opportunities and challenges it faces.

Overall it was a great experience and I would recommend to anyone that is offered the chance to study PR to go for it.

Posted by Cat.

Orchard is still recruiting for an account executive, so if a career in PR sounds like the thing for you, please get in touch.

Martyn Gettings

In 2009 I left Guernsey for Nottingham in the Midlands. Thanks to my experience at Orchard I landed a job working for one of the largest agencies in the area with household names on its books. Gaining employment amid the worst recession in living memory was in no small part thanks to the skills I learned from my OPR mentors and the compulsory CIPR training I undertook whilst there.  As an AE in Nottingham I worked on campaigns for Pirelli, the National Apprenticeship Service and Kidney Research UK. I was involved with the new F1 sponsorship announcement and supported the Pirelli Calendar on its annual release.

In March 2011 I moved to Proactive PR – an international multimedia PR agency with clients all over the world. I am now an account manager with a portfolio of clients spanning the telecoms and satellite sectors. I also act as an interviewer for international trade-show television channels. In the last two months I have interviewed chiefs from Google, Microsoft, IBM, the UK government and even News International. On a day to day basis I connect with and advise top-level execs around the world from Canada to Japan and in September I am off to Amsterdam and Paris for two of the biggest telecoms and broadcasting exhibitions in the world.

The attention and guidance I received thanks to the ethos and the encouragement of the personnel at Orchard gave me the best possible grounding and a foundation for success. It is very appropriate to say that Orchard PR launched my career.

Emily Falla

Having embarked on a degree in Public Relations it wasn’t until I had stepped into Orchard Towers on my placement year that my learning truly began. Working with some of the most skilled practitioners in the Channel Islands, it was their dedication, hard work and encouragement, towards both clients and staff, that truly engendered a passion for what it is that we ‘PR people’ do. Orchard created opportunities for me to gain great experience, enabling me to work on communications programmes across all industry sectors, from accountancy to recruitment to health.

Three years on and I am now working in London for Lansons Communications, one of the top 25 PR Consultancies. As Lansons is integrated agency, I now support clients both offline and online, developing and implementing consumer campaigns for big brands as well as staying true to my financial services roots. Not dissimilar from Orchard, at the heart of Lansons is its people and while I hope my career continues to blossom in the Big Smoke, a little piece of me will always remain in the Orchard.

Stay tuned to the Orchard blog to hear from more of our ‘alumni’.

Posted by Chris.

I was lucky enough to do my placement with someone working in PR – those few fun but hectic days and then winning the Management Shadowing Award gave me a keen interest in the industry, some confidence in my ability and most importantly a direction.

It was a funny old process writing down and then talking about all the things I have (and haven’t) done in my PR life during the last ten years, from the early days at CMA PR and Event Management to my four years spent studying PR at Bournemouth University – hopefully a useful tale for the students to hear about.

Oddly it only took me about 10 minutes to whizz through the highlights of the last decade which included: PR theory study, running a host of client events, many many press drops to London’s finest beauty journalists, a PR dissertation, my first stint at Orchard PR as an account executive, my time at Clarion Communications and then back to the Orchard family as a consultant in 2008.

The main point I hope I passed onto the students, six of whom also stood and made excellent presentations about their shadowing experiences, was that whilst a bit of luck and good timing can help you build a career at the end of the day no matter what industry you go into it is mostly about hard work.

I may have needed to go between the Guernsey and London PR worlds a couple of times to work out I would finally end up on the little rock rather than in the big smoke but my industry experience is certainly richer because of these moves.

That hard work thing I mentioned to the students doesn’t just happen at the start of your career: as we all know it still happens every day so when the evening was brought to a close with the following quote from Steve Jobs, I realised that I am very lucky to love what I do:

‘Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.’

Best get on with some of that hard work…

Posted by Brooke.

We have a vacancy for an account executive, often the first step onto the PR ladder for many people. It’s a position that comes with fantastic opportunities for learning and experiencing new things and developing skills and meeting very useful people. So, rather than writing out another job ad, we thought who better to tell you why you want to be a PR account executive at Orchard than our awesomely talented team themselves. So we asked them a few questions to see what they think.

What is the best thing about working in PR?

Chloe: Seeing coverage you have achieved for your clients. It sounds nerdy but you get a real buzz from opening a newspaper and seeing your story.

Cat:  No two days are ever the same because quite often you are reacting to stories reported by the media and participating in issues management. It is also a great chance to develop relationships with clients, journalists and photographers and sometimes you even get the chance to meet a celebrity!

What is your typical day like at Orchard?

Harry: I don’t know if there is a ‘typical’ day at Orchard PR. From media calls, where the local media all want to do interviews with our clients, to photo shoots where I need to get the perfect photo to go with the news release I just drafted, my working day varies so much. One day I’ll be in the office, liaising with journalists on the phone, drafting news releases and monitoring the media and the next I’ll be out at a client meeting, attending an event and networking with local business people.

Cat: It is important to stay on top of what is happening in the news so typically the first duty of the day is to search the morning’s stories online. Picking up the phone to our clients to find out what is happening at their end usually guides us to what we will be doing for the rest of the day.

What sort of clients do you work for and which ones do you enjoy the most?

Cat: A large proportion of Orchard’s clients are from Guernsey’s finance industry however we also work with a variety of companies from different sectors including retail, energy, regulation and even a notable night club. Each client has its own individual needs and as a consequence the work can be very different but extremely interesting and enjoyable.

Harry: A utilities company, a nightclub, a law firm and trust company are just some of the clients I work for and I enjoy dealing with all of them, because they are all so different. Some of the more enjoyable events have included meeting a famous DJ and the less enjoyable…having to wear a fluorescent jacket and helmet…but that’s PR!

Adie: I enjoy our community-based clients and the times when you can get involved with helping out on events and managing projects. I have particularly enjoyed working with designers and printers on the creative elements of campaigns but I am also gaining experience and learning a lot from working with our financial clients.

What skills have you developed working at Orchard?

Chloe: I have always loved writing, and that’s really important in this business, but I didn’t really know how to write news. Reading lots of news has really helped with that but I have also had a lot of practice in a short time.

Cat: Working for a number of different clients requires you to develop excellent organisational and time management skills. It is also essential that you have the confidence to talk to people because on a daily basis you will be communicating not only with clients but journalists from  Guernsey, Jersey and the UK trade titles.

What skills are you working hardest on at the moment?

Chloe:  I am trying to be more assertive and confident; I was very shy before I worked at Orchard but I can now talk to people on the phone without fear – massive step!

Adie: Honing my communication skills and focusing on my own time management.

Why should people want to be an account executive at Orchard?

Adie: If you are a keen writer, communicator and proactive problem solver, you will enjoy this job. There are so many aspects to your everyday work that you are constantly developing and building upon your existing skills and learning new ones.  Some would say you need to be a ‘people person’, but I think ‘an all-rounder’ would be a better description. You need to juggle a lot of clients, be on top of your workload, enjoy writing and always be happy to help. If you thrive when working with people and words, then you will go far in this industry.

Cat: The team at Orchard are really friendly and supportive and because each member of the team is so talented it is a fantastic opportunity to learn new things from them. Another factor which should appeal is the chance to undertake professional qualifications such as the Advanced Certificate and Diploma in PR which are supported by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations.

If you think you’d like to join the team at Orchard, head to our PR careers page to find out how to apply.

But if you’re still not convinced that you that you should be working in PR, we’ll be back next week with some another blog to hear from a few ‘Orchard Alumni’ and how Orchard helped launch their PR careers.