If you’re an employer in comms and PR, either agency side or in-house, it’s likely that diversity is up there on your corporate agenda.
I’ve written before on different initiatives which can help you tackle diversity issues in your organisation and thought now might be a good time to highlight all the ways you could get involved specifically with the Taylor Bennett Foundation.
The Taylor Bennett Foundation was established in 2007 to improve access to the PR industry for young people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds (BAME). We do this through an award-winning ten week traineeship programme, mentoring, and summer internship placements. Over 150 PR employers support these programmes by donating, hosting visits, offering mentors, and offering work placements.
Each year we run a number of 10 week PR traineeship programmes for BAME graduates. 97% of our alumni are employed and over 60% work in communications. These programmes are a large commitment for the sponsors which previously include Brunswick, Finsbury, FTI Consulting, Talk PR, Edelman, MHP, The Red Consultancy, Charlotte Street Partners, and Standard Life Aberdeen.
There are also a number of other ways to get involved:
When our six BAME graduate trainees are on their 10 week traineeship programme we send them out to visit as many different in-house comms teams and PR consultancies as possible. This gives them the opportunity to experience lots of different comms environments and to learn about a range of sectors and disciplines. A visit is typically three hours long and involves someone quite senior giving an overview of the organisation and its work, someone very junior talking about what they do in their day-to-day job, and the best visits have included some kind of task. For example, one hosts often ask trainees to analyse their competitor’s social channels and give their views on what they could be doing better. Some agencies ask trainees for ideas on a live brief, some give them a brief from a previous client and ask them to come up with campaign ideas.
There is no financial cost to hosting a visit, it’s just a few hours of time, and it’s an opportunity for you to flag if you’re recruiting at entry-level to a diverse group of graduates.
Our PR mentoring programme is for 3- 6 months. We’ll select the BAME grad/student and send you their details and you’ll then decide internally who will mentor them.
Our current mentors range in experience from SAE/press officer to CEO/head of comms so it’s a very inclusive programme.
– Completion of a very brief online feedback form at the end of the four weeks
In addition, we are offering you the opportunity to send your team members along to PR lectures in June 2018 (they do not have to be BAME!). These sessions will be delivered by leading practitioners and academics and are very competitively priced at £65 per lecture (or all 17 lectures for £500!)
The CIPR and PRCA have both accredited these lectures with CPD points.
Job Alerts
We send weekly job alerts to our alumni. Over 200 graduates have been through our traineeships, 50+ have been through our mentoring programme and a further 15 – 30 will go through our summer placement scheme. They range from 1 month to 7 years of experience and work from junior account executive to director level across a range of sectors and disciplines, both in-house and agency side. If you have a vacancy you’d like to flag to them we ask for a £50 donation and we’ll include the details in our weekly e-mailout to them.
It’s also worth mentioning that we’re looking at growing our work in two ways:
Geographically: We’re launching in Scotland in June and are looking at other ways to expand our work outside of London. If you’re a regional employer, get in touch.
