North Riverside Park Mall Brings Holiday Cheer to Local Boys & Girls Club

The holiday season is a festive time for all, and LCWA’s client, North Riverside Park Mall, knows that there’s plenty of joy to spread around. That’s why they set out to make this holiday season the most memorable, and meaningful, yet by joining forces with a local community organization – the Little Village Boys & Girls Club. 

LCWA facilitated a new partnership with the Little Village Boys & Girls Club – not a far drive from North Riverside Park Mall – to help kids celebrate and fulfill Christmas lists this holiday season. North Riverside Park Mall hosted a special shopping event for 15 club members between the ages of eight and 13, providing each with a $200 Visa gift card to use at stores of their choosing throughout the mall. Most these children don’t often have the chance to pick out toys and gifts on their own, so this was a very special occasion for all involved.

In addition to shopping, the mall prepared a festive ornament-making craft, treats from local merchants and personalized photos with Santa! LCWA distributed a customized media alert and worked with Chicago’s ABC 7 to have the entire event captured and showcased as a Chicago Proud segment on the 10 p.m. nightly news.

Check out the Chicago Proud clip here. Happy Holidays!

AASM Sheds Light on Binge-Watching

A new survey from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) found that U.S. adults rank sleep as their second most important priority, following family. However, data show that Americans are often limiting their opportunities to get enough healthy sleep. A primary culprit of sleep restriction? Binge-watching. In the AASM survey, a whopping 88% of U.S. adults admitted they had lost sleep due to staying up late to watch multiple episodes of a TV show or streaming series – and this number jumps to 95% when looking at 18-44-year-olds.

To drive awareness of this issue, we worked with AASM to craft and distribute a press release on the findings and conducted media outreach. Additionally, LCWA also coordinated distribution of a feature release to increase awareness in communities nationwide.

These findings on what binge-watching does to sleep secured coverage with several national outlets, including: Atlanta Journal Constitution, Philadelphia Inquirer, MSN, Southern Living, Medscape, New Hampshire Union Leader, Thrive Global, WebMD and Yahoo! Lifestyle. Conversation continued on local television and radio stations across the country, including: KMSP-TV (Minneapolis), KTVU-TV (San Francisco), KUSA-TV (Denver), KYKY-FM (St. Louis, Mo.), WLS-TV (Chicago) and KTHV-TV (Little Rock, Ark.). Overall, initiatives to highlight the impact binge-watching has on our sleep earned more than 372.3 million impressions.

How to Turn Your Internship into a Job

We were thrilled to welcome Abigail Cox as an assistant account executive to our team this fall, after she completed a very successful internship. Here are Abigail's tips for turning that internship opportunity into a full-time job.

Nothing can replace real world experience, especially in the world of public relations. In the workplace, projects and campaigns created for your clients will not be returned with an “A+” written in red on the front – it’s more of a pass or fail scenario. Creating a campaign for a pretend client in class is great practice, but doing it in a real job brings on a whole new set of expectations. An internship can help bridge those gaps between the work done in the class room and the work waiting for you in the real world. 

Beyond the value of real world experience an internship offers, it also has the potential to turn into your first real job. If you’re looking to turn your internship into a job, here are three tips to help you score your first job offer:

Take notes.

When I started my sixth internship, it was hard not to feel like I had the whole internship thing down pat. But I knew the reality was that I had so much to learn every single day. And that will still be true every day of my career. We all have room to grow and learn, and an internship is the optimal time to soak in the knowledge and experience of the people around you who have been in the game a lot longer and are eager to help you develop as a young professional.

Ask questions.

Asking questions shows that you are both engaged and invested in learning and developing your skills. It also gives you a chance to start conversations with your new coworkers or bosses. Through my own internship experience, I found that staying curious, being teachable and never being afraid to ask questions can go a long way.

Treat every day like a job interview.

This was some of the best advice I received from my father before starting my post-grad internship. If you are interning with the goal of one day being offered a job (which you should be), treat every day like a job interview because when you think about it – it is. Employers know that even if you can teach someone how to do a job – you can’t teach someone to be a hard worker and you can’t teach someone to care. See an internship as an opportunity not to prove that you know everything, but to prove that you are teachable, hardworking and passionate about the industry you’re in.

Turning your internship into a job might feel daunting, but keep in mind that everyone started their career from the same spot you’re in right now. Many of our team members at LCWA started as interns, including myself. Take these tips into consideration and we’re confident it’ll help you land that first full-time job in no time.