{"id":110393,"date":"2017-11-28T15:11:19","date_gmt":"2017-11-28T15:11:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/?p=110393"},"modified":"2017-11-29T10:52:01","modified_gmt":"2017-11-29T10:52:01","slug":"pr-spotlight-saskia-james-consumer-media-pr-graduate-npower","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/blog\/pr-spotlight-saskia-james-consumer-media-pr-graduate-npower\/","title":{"rendered":"PR Spotlight: Saskia James, Consumer Media PR Graduate, npower"},"content":{"rendered":"

Saskia James is currently on a consumer media PR graduate rotation for npower\u2019s Business Leadership scheme. Working on a number of npower\u2019s PR projects, including its charitable work, Saskia is still fairly new to the world of Public Relations and, as such, has a fresh perspective on the industry.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Saskia’s time at npower has been\u00a0hampered by her Functional Neurological Disorder, but she’s found that PR has the versatility to support her with a variety of different work projects. She also reveals her overall impression of the PR industry, from challenging to caring, and how she\u2019s faced with ethical dilemmas when dealing with some of npower\u2019s more vulnerable customers.<\/strong><\/p>\n

What\u2019s the npower Business Leadership scheme?<\/strong>
\nnpower\u2019s Business Leadership scheme is a graduate programme of four six-month placements almost anywhere you choose in the company. I joined in September 2016. The first placement on the Business Leadership scheme is always one you\u2019re given and it normally has a customer focus, so I spent six months in digital strategy, which I really enjoyed. But I knew that digital life wasn\u2019t for me \u2013 I need more of a focus on sustainability, which is where my interests lie.<\/p>\n

For my next placement, I thought I\u2019d do something that allowed me to touch on lots of different projects, whilst also giving me some key skills. That\u2019s what led me to choose PR. Being able to write well, speak well and read a lot of material, dilute and clarify it, will be useful wherever I am in the future. I also thought I should have an understanding of the outside perspective of npower and an overview of what we do, what people think of us and what we can do to change that.<\/p>\n

How have you found the PR department?<\/strong>
\nI joined in March, but only managed a month before having to take four months off for health reasons.<\/p>\n

I have something called Functional Neurological Disorder (also called Non-Epileptic Attack Disorder) which means I suffer from seizures reasonably regularly \u2013 sort of once a week, if not more. I\u2019ve had it for 10 years now and there are certain things that make it worse. Stress and exhaustion are two such things, and working in PR I\u2019ve found that both happen quite a lot.<\/p>\n

I love the idea of big projects, short deadlines, go go go \u2013 it\u2019s exciting. I thought that might suit me, and mentally it still does, but physically I just can\u2019t handle it and now, at least, I know that.<\/p>\n

How has your health affected your PR work?<\/strong>
\nThe biggest struggle is to say no and try and slow down a bit, because I\u2019m so curious but also get very tired. I\u2019ve found my health has never impacted on my work significantly before \u2013 at university and school it was always results-orientated so it didn\u2019t matter if you were there day to day, it only mattered if you could get the results in exams or essays. In PR, a good portion of the work you do is about turning up and being there on the day, which I\u2019ve struggled with somewhat. But npower has been absolutely wonderful in terms of my health; I couldn\u2019t have asked for more support.<\/p>\n

In order to try and work around my difficulties, my team and I have arranged for me to do some of the more \u2018back end\u2019 work of PR, rather than working on, say, one of the PR and marketing campaigns. Instead, I write the stories that aren\u2019t so time sensitive and do some of the process work to try to get systems in place for the team going forward. It\u2019s a shame because it means I\u2019m missing out on chunk of PR that would be interesting, but it also shows that PR has a lot to give anyone, no matter their ways of working.<\/p>\n

It also shows that PR has a lot to give anyone, no matter their ways of working<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What\u2019s the structure at npower like?<\/strong>
\nGuy Esnouf is Director of Communication and Corporate Responsibility. He heads up three teams: internal comms, CSR and PR. Within PR, Zoe Melarkey heads up the team and there\u2019s four of us working under her. We also have two people that work part time in PR and part time in internal comms, I think largely to encourage collaboration between the two.<\/p>\n

In terms of focus areas, we\u2019ve a lovely new team member that focuses on corporate PR; she does all the relations with our parent company Innogy, financial reporting and that kind of thing. The rest of us focus on domestic and small business PR. Within that we\u2019re very collaborative so everyone gets involved. One person tends to lead on each project, but everyone gets involved to help and support where possible.<\/p>\n

What projects do you focus on?<\/strong>
\nI have four main objectives, though I do try to get involved outside of these.<\/p>\n

The first one is to act as press officer within the team. This means answering calls from the media, determining what they want to know and finding an answer for them to their deadline, which is usually very short. I also read the press cuttings and write the press releases for smaller events that that other teams around the business are working on \u2013 like being a call centre for Children in Need.<\/p>\n

My second objective is to look into our Fuel Bank programme, which has just launched as a charity. So far, this has largely involved collecting case studies and talking to the beneficiaries of our projects. I\u2019ve done 34 very emotional calls; these people have absolutely chilling stories about how their lives have fallen apart quite quickly. There\u2019s starvation in the UK and most people don\u2019t really realise it. Most of the beneficiaries of the Fuel Bank will go to great lengths to survive whilst hiding it from their kids and others. My job is to show that there is a problem and that npower is doing its utmost to try to do something about it.<\/p>\n

My job is to show that there is a problem and that npower is doing its utmost to try to do something about it.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

With the launch of the Fuel Bank\u2019s charity status, there\u2019s some room to go out to the media now and tell these stories and make people aware. I\u2019ve learnt that you have to be quite strategic about timings because if I\u2019d tried to sell it to the media over the last month or so, no one would have been interested\u00a0as we already had other stories coming from npower about the Fuel Bank. In January, we\u2019re still in winter but the other stories have died down, so that\u2019s when I\u2019ll do it.<\/p>\n

My third objective is around our Health Through Warmth Scheme. It\u2019s another charitable scheme we run and involves the same sort of things \u2013 talking to beneficiaries, collecting case studies and pushing it out to the media. There though, the people involved are even more vulnerable and, though learning their stories is relatively easy, pushing it out to the media is difficult because they may not totally be aware of what they\u2019re agreeing to.<\/p>\n

As someone that prides themselves on being quite ethical, I\u2019m very aware of the\u00a0 balance of wanting to get PR for the scheme, which does help an enormous amount of people in a huge way, with making sure we always give priority to the fragility of the people involved, especially when there are mental issues involved. Learning about this balance is good thing for me to do because it really highlights the ethical dimension of PR.<\/p>\n

My last objective is working with the PRCA to do an external audit of the team, trying to improve our processes, to make these best in class. This involves setting up contingency plans if things go wrong or issues arise. My hope is that while, in the long term, this will help the team to work more efficiently, it will also highlight really how talented the team is and the amount of work that they do.<\/p>\n

How do you approach media relations?<\/strong>
\nIt\u2019s a delicate balance. A lot of our national media coverage is for \u2018bad news\u2019 stories, and we often have to spend a lot of time \u2018firefighting\u2019. A lot of the press office work we do tends to focus on regional media, often around our offices which are located across the country. Regional media are always looking for stories and they like the idea of a local company as people want to know a bit more about what happens in the business and how they\u2019ve helped people close by.<\/p>\n

With regional media, I find that you can build good relationships quite quickly, because you\u2019re effectively calling up the same people again and again, and it becomes just a chat; it\u2019s less serious and it\u2019s less demanding. I\u2019m not saying it\u2019s easy, it isn\u2019t by any means, but they don\u2019t tend to judge us so harshly or see us in such a black and white manner.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s your overall impression of PR?<\/strong>
\nI think PR has a poor reputation and that has not been helped by some issues in recent years that were badly managed. I think it is considered quite hard, and I find it very challenging myself as a place to work. You need to be on top of lots of things all the time, which can be hard when you\u2019re new to the field. God knows how somebody starting in a new industry and a new company, manages when they\u2019re not a graduate \u2013 I\u2019m expected to be learning and know nothing but when you\u2019re fresh out of university joining a PR company as a legitimate full-time staff member\u2026 I don\u2019t know how they do it.<\/p>\n

PR is unpredictable; the amount of multitasking needed is crazy! I\u2019m sat for about five minutes on a project and someone calls in, so I drop everything and then someone else asks for help and people need things and, all of a sudden, your day\u2019s gone out the window. That\u2019s very exciting, in a way, because you never know what you\u2019re going to get but it makes it quite hard to think of the bigger picture. I find it hard to do that as someone at the lowest level of PR, but Zoe, who leads our team, always has a good idea of all the projects going on, what state they\u2019re in and what needs to be done. That takes an enormous amount of brain power and an enormous amount of ability and intelligence. It\u2019s impressive.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s more caring and personal than I ever thought it would be.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think you have to be curious about everything; to question what\u2019s been said but also what hasn\u2019t. There\u2019s also the problem of jargon. Someone can give me documents saying x, y, z \u2013 assuming I know the jargon and, actually, I don\u2019t and no one else does, and if I put it out as is, it\u2019ll just get lost.<\/p>\n

The opportunistic aspect of PR is quite often lost when you\u2019re in an industry that does get such negative publicity all the time. It\u2019s hard to jump on the band wagon or to take advantage of something when there are so many people that need to say yes and sign off, and check and double check.<\/p>\n

PR is also about research and customer focus \u2013 drilling down into individuals that have benefitted from our schemes.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s more caring and personal than I ever thought it would be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Saskia James is currently on a consumer media PR graduate rotation for npower\u2019s Business Leadership scheme. Working on a number of npower\u2019s PR projects, including its charitable work, Saskia is still fairly new to the world of Public Relations and, as such, has a fresh perspective on the industry. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":423,"featured_media":110397,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7272,1109,7326],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110393"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/423"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110393"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":115501,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110393\/revisions\/115501"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}