TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Bosko Nelkoski
The training course for public relations and image management aims at developing the quality of youth activities and capabilities of civil society organizations in the youth field for fighting poverty and social exclusion with giving opportunity to the participants for acquiring skills for further self-employment in the PR sector. This training course aims at improvement of the participant’s competences, knowledge, skills and attitudes to higher quality practice in the youth field regarding working with socially excluded groups. The main project objective is to develop an understanding of the nature of PR and the role of practitioners when they are coming from socially excluded groups , to recognize the key areas of PR involvement as a tool for self-promotion and promotion of organizations activities, and to make familiar the basic concepts and principles of PR.
The project aims at training NGO employees and project managers how to build and maintain positive and cooperative relationship with the public and also how to create a positive environment using PR methods to promote solutions for social inclusion of marginalized groups. The training course would help the participants to develop skills through non-formal learning methods in forms of games and real-life situations and examples, problem-solving games to acquire the following skills: critical analysis, media analysis, essay writing, referencing, blogging as a tool for self-promotion that can be used for promotion of socially excluded groups, team work, presentation skills, ethical judgement, formulation of PR plan and time management.
The training course would take place in the city of Struga form 1st to 9th of April 2011 with 38 participants from 14 countries: Macedonia, Georgia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Armenia, Estonia, Romania, Latvia, Italy, Albania, Malta, Poland, Croatia, Germany and Malta.
The projects theme is rather self-explanatory from the previous information. We live in an over communicated society, where the vast majority of organizations compete to gain access to the sore media resources to put their message across to their potential partners, supporters and donors, and non-profit organizations generally have to depend on the donor agencies. The non-profit organizations today are using Public Relations as a key strategy to reach their audience and to establish a sustainable relationship with them. The project theme sprout from the non-profit organizations themselves, we saw that the need for this type of training in order to work more efficientlly in spreading our message for promoting European Values and European Citizenship to the youth and the general public from our countries. The project theme aims at qualifying the participants to strenghten their activities designed to network and enhance their capacity in their field of expertise. The project theme levels at developing and understanding the nature of PR and the important role of the PR and its practitioners. The theme of the project is with the use of non-formal learning methids to provide the participants to acquire skills and competences they will use in developing further promotional campaigns regardless their subject and field of working.
The theme of the course is about qualifying the attendees how to think strategically and how to prepare a long-term PR strategy for their organizations. The profile of the participants we are requiring are for people who would like to learn more about the newest methods in PRing that attracts most attention, and have influenced the public the most. NGO sector is very important in building transparancy in Europe and spreading the words of promotion of the European values and European citizenship.
The non-profit sector knows that effective practice of PR builds ideas from one segment of the population and conveys them clearly to others, forming a common ground of communication for the various groups who make up our society. analysis of any successful public campaign will reveal clear, concise communication, common sense in appealing to people’s wants and needs, combined with a little imagination.
The non-profit sector is in need fo public relations, and this is the common ground gor the participants on this training course. The activities during the training would be mostly conducted by the participants themselves by the means of presentations and sharing and exchange of expertise and experiences, however some of the activities would be carried out by trainers from the fiels of PR and professional PR bloggers that will introduce the participants with the new methodologies in blogging. The training would use working methods that are used in the non-formal learning : Discussions, case studies, analysis of campaigns, game like situations, improvised speeches, intercultural games for networking etc. The methods planed would be combined with a theoretical part as a representative from the formal learning due to the seriousness of the project theme. Therefore, the methods would provide a mixture of theory and practive, sharing ad exchangng oppinions, expertise and experiences in the field of PR. In accordance to this, the training would provide the participants acquiring competences from the practical and theoretical component:
- skills and competences acquired from the practical component: critical analysis, media analysis, essay and report writing, research for PR information, team work, presentation skills
- skills acquired from the theoretical component: ethical judgement, formulation of PR plan and time management.
The planed activities will contribute to the process of non-formal learning by proposition that the participants would be provoked to step up and present their experiences in working with public relations, and also attendees would be actively invloved in the whole non-formal and formal learning process, by the means of designed workshops that ask from the participants active involvement in the training course.
The project have impact on each organization’s working and on each individual participant. The impact would be seen in the further conducted campaigns and PR strategies made by the organizations.
The participants would fell the impact of the training in gaining skills they will use further in life; becoming aware and appreciate other cultures; get familiar with improved working on Youth in Action projects; and learning about spreading messages promoting the European values.
I was part of the Trainers team and worked together in all of the activities during the project. I did a presentation of methods for Marketing in non-profit sector as this is my expertise.