Each month we bring you behind the scenes to put the well deserved spotlight on our staff that help us make a difference to communities throughout the North East. This month meet Alison Emerson, Marketing and Communication Officer!
I'm Marketing and Communications Officer at the Pioneering Care Partnership (PCP), working on the Adult Wellbeing Services contract which includes Wellbeing for Life, Joining the Dots, Cancer Awareness Team, Health Squad, Health Check and Get Set for Surgery.
Before joining PCP I worked in the charity sector for 13 years, most of that spent as Communications Officer at Alice House Hospice in Hartlepool. This is where I found my love of websites, social media and the opportunity to meet with patients and clients to chat about their first hand experiences of a service. I was involved in the rebrand from Hartlepool & District Hospice to Alice House and the review, rebuild and ongoing content management of their WordPress website alongside designing all of the promotional materials for fundraising event support.
I mostly work with internal staff across all of the projects but do get out and about to meet clients for case studies and to meet the teams for photographs and video work to help provide a narrative around the services.
I work full time (first time in 22 years!) and find that my days just whizz by with a mix of creating content and images for social media, design work for leaflets and other promotional materials, updating websites and writing press releases.
Every day is different! Most start off with checking socials to respond to comments and find out who’s watching us. I could then be ‘getting creative’ and designing a newsletter or leaflet or doing something a bit more ‘dry’ like looking at statistics and working out what we need to do to improve engagement with our audience. Sometimes I get away from the desk to get video footage or photographs of our wonderful teams and sometimes clients too (I love being behind the camera – not too fond of being in front of it though!)
I’ve only been with PCP since October 2023 so still a bit of a newbie, but one thing is for sure, I wish I’d made the move sooner. I love working for an organisation that values each individual and what they can bring to the organisation. I’ve still got a huge case of imposter syndrome but have found the marketing team to be so supporting and welcoming – I think they’re a bit fab! It’s an environment that really brings out the best in people and that, in turn, means people give their best for the organisation – that’s my focus every day – to be the best version of me and to add as much value as I can.
I find it incredibly rewarding to know that something I have produced or been part of will help to make a difference to someone’s life. While I don’t work directly with clients, it’s important to remember that without the ‘back office’ functions, those roles would be so much harder to carry out. Having said that, I do love getting out to meet clients and listen to the ways they have improved their lives and how much they appreciate the support they’ve been offered – these are the stories I love to share.
Our team had some insightful training with some experienced journalists – understanding what it is that makes them stop and read a press release and how we need to structure our content in order to grab their attention has really changed how I think about writing – it’s such a different style.
I’ve also had some time management training delivered by Vicky Browning, Operations Manager and Bobby Hewitson, Project Development Manager – it was a really fun session and I definitely took some learnings away from it – especially the 'time spent matrix' which I use every week now – not sure how I managed without one really.
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