What a Communications Manager Does for a Living

I am writing this post mainly for my family. I love them dearly, but I am tired of trying to explain what I do for a living. Like other people who work in an office, I attend many meetings, but I do so much more than that.

To start, I am the communications manager for a large performing arts organization. I am a member of the marketing department, which has 10 total employees and two interns. My areas of focus are our educational and fundraising programs...and other duties as assigned. My title is communications manager, but what I do can also be described as public relations and marketing.

I maintain the media list
A tedious, but important, part of public relations is maintaining a good list of media contacts. I maintain the list for our entire department, which is comprised of contacts at print publications, at radio stations, at television stations, bloggers and online outlets. I update our list with new email addresses for current contacts, add new contacts and delete those that, for one reason or another, no longer belong on our list.

I cultivate and maintain relationships with members of the media
It is much easier to obtain coverage for something when you have good relationships with the media. I meet with key contacts occasionally to determine their interests and update them on what I have coming up.

I write, distribute and track press releases
Press releases are documents that have all the pertinent information relating to an event, program, award or other type of announcement for which we want to obtain media coverage. The first thing I do when getting ready to issue a release is schedule it. I work with seven other people who issue press releases. As a rule, we allow only one to go out from our organization each day. After I have my release scheduled, I write it and distribute it internally as appropriate for fact-checking. Then I email it to our media list. I call or email key media contacts to make sure they've received it and to suggest ("pitch") ideas ("angles") for stories or interviews. Through Google Alerts and our clipping service, I check to see where we received media coverage.

I schedule media appearances and interviews
As a public relations professional, my job is not to get on the news. My job is to get our key spokespeople on the news. So, I will make arrangements for our key people to be interviewed on camera, on the radio or by a reporter for a print publication when appropriate. If that interview is to take place at a radio or television studio, I will accompany that person to the studio. Occasionally, one of our key people is not available and in those instances, I may do the interview myself as I did here: http://www.wkyc.com/life/programming/shows/goodcompany/gc_article.aspx?storyid=110107.

I write copy
Copy, NOT text or verbiage. I write copy for ads, brochures, catalogs, email blasts, signs, newsletters, playbills, postcards, websites, and probably other things that I can't think of right now.

I art direct
I work with graphic artists and our web manager to create the visual look of ads, collateral materials (brochures, catalogs, etc.) and signs. Everything I create has to align with our organization's brand standards.

This post is already getting quite lengthy, and I still have more to say! I'll save it for another post though. For now, I'll close by saying that, as you can see, there's never a dull moment in my job. Every day is different, and I love just about every minute of it!