Global Communications Project 2020 - My Experience

Looking back at 2020 (it’s still January so I still class it as being the beginning of the year and I’m still in reflection mode), one of the most difficult, yet valuable and rewarding things I did for the first half of the year is to take part in the Global Communications Project with my university. (I did speak about this in one of my weekly lockdown posts but I will talk in more detail here about it all). 

This project is exclusive to Public Relations students, where universities from all over the world join together and work with each other to create out-of-this-world ideas and campaigns for a specific brief. Leeds Beckett University is the UK’s university that participates in this project, and all the students on my course were split into pairs/threes who then eventually joined a larger team of students from all over the world!!! In my team there was around 30 of us overall. 

One of the actual aims of the project is to help you develop your communication skills via the internet, by hosting meetings online, organising everything via emails, chatting online and general online communication, and then at the end of the project, students would travel to a chosen location in the world for that year, where students could meet their team members in person, and then present their work together. 

Obviously, we all know now that 2020 had other ideas, and the virtual working wasn’t quite as unique as it normally is as it seems to be a skill the world learnt this year but what was unique was that we had to do our final presentations online instead of in person. It was pretty heart-breaking not being able to get the true experience and not meeting all my teammates in person, but our year is unique and will always be remembered. 

When the project began properly and we had all been assigned to a team, this was when the pandemic hit hard and the whole world went into lockdown. Understandably, the process of the project between us students started slowly as there were issues with communication and organising in this unusual time. 

To briefly chat about what my team decided to do - we split our team into 4 executive teams based on time zones (so we could work together better) and used WhatsApp to communicate. We then divided topics of research between the executive teams and then kept these topics throughout the whole project, so the team members were thoroughly clued up and basically an expert on their topic by the end of it. 

We held meetings every Tuesday as a whole team at the same time every week that we found worked for all time zones, to communicate with one another and share progress and ideas. My team was lucky to have an amazing team leader who organised us, and throughout the weeks we discovered that everyone had different strengths and weaknesses which would help us with our campaign. 

We all developed such a great friendship in the process of working together, meeting every week and chatting about everything going on at the time. I think this is the best part for me as it meant that I really enjoyed the experience even more than I already was doing, and it made us even more motivated to smash the project after we worked so hard! 

We presented our campaign in the initial round firstly and were then selected to compete in the final of the project; these were the top three chosen campaigns in the project. Unfortunately, we didn’t win, but this didn’t matter to our team. We had come so far in such a difficult time in everyone’s lives, worked so hard and made new friends in the process. 

For future students who take part in this project, please throw yourself in there!!! It is pretty easy to sit back and let other team members do the work for you, but don’t! I have developed my skills in organisation, presenting, leadership and I learnt a lot from other team members. I would highly recommend this project to any young PR professionals as a way to make connections around the world, learn about new cultures, develop intercultural and practical PR skills and get stuck in with an amazing PR opportunity to make you stand out from other young professionals in the UK as this is a unique project to Leeds Beckett. 

Thanks for reading! Keep smiling and have a great day! Liv xxx