Reference no: EM132192897

Practical Assessment: Professional written communication

Task Description

Assessment type: Individual written assessment.

Length: The assessment must be between 1000-1500 words in length. Two marks will be deducted for assessments that are over or under by 200 words.

Cover sheet: The assessment must include a cover page that contains your name, student number, resident campus, assessment title, and name of lecturer and/or tutor. Style: The assessment must be single-spaced, 12 Point; Times New Roman. References: The assessment must include 5 academic references. You must use the APA reference style.

Other: This assessment is aimed to assess your written communication skills. Students who do not perform well will be highly recommended to consider training with Academic Learning Centre (ALC). The assessment is aimed to ensure that you have an advanced level of writing skills before you proceed into other units in the postgraduate course. The assessment will also assess the integrity of your work. Given all students will do the same assessment, plagiarism will be monitored to ensure that your submitted work is original and not purchased or copied from other students. Where assessments are found to be similar, penalties may apply in accord with University policy.

Task description: In this task, you will write a memo in response to the case study provided below. The memo must be logically structured, free of grammatical errors, professionally styled; in addition, follow the writing conventions for memos as discussed in the lecture and supporting material.

Case study: You are the President of the Turkey Farmers Association of Australia, which consists of sole operators, small producers and four big producers who have their own marketing teams. The Turkey Farmers Association of Australia wants to launch an Australia-wide media campaign to encourage Australians to think of eating turkey every day and not just at Christmas, so that turkey producers can expand their sales. Turkey would be portrayed as a healthy alternative to red meat and chicken while being an inexpensive and versatile meal. Each member of the Turkey Farmers Association of Australia were asked for their opinions about the ideas for the campaign. Most smaller producers were happy to go along with the others, but the four major producers submitted marketing proposals.

"Company 1: There is so much advertising these days, if we really want people to put turkey on the table they need to see or hear our ads several times so that the message sinks in.

Company 2: Most people do shopping on Thursdays or Saturdays so we should use the budget to run radio ads on those two days so people will hear it on their way to the supermarket.

Company 3: The goal should be to get as many people as possible to see our ad at least once. We should compare the CPM (the advertising bought on the basis of impression) across TV, radio, newspapers and magazines, and pick options that gives us the biggest bang for our buck and then schedule ads evenly across all days of the week.

Company 4: A combination of direct marketing, in-store samples, and a Facebook group would help us develop an ongoing dialogue without customers. Also using those media would make it easier for us to track the success of the campaign" (Sharp, 2017, p. 547).

The solution you decide to implement as the President is entirely your decision, you may choose one of the suggested company strategies above or combine up a maximum of three different strategies due to budget constraints or make an executive decision which uses none of this information. It is the communication from you, as President, to your members that is the important consideration, not the actual marketing strategy itself. Issues you need to address in your memo to your members:

1. Members have previously complained that they were not being asked for their opinions and decisions made by the Turkey Farmers Association of Australia were not communicated to members, as the first members knew a decision had been made, was when members saw the decision being talked about or advertisements were shown in the media. Therefore, the Turkey Farmers Association
of Australia has issues of internal communication.

2. Members of the Turkey Farmers Association of Australia are located throughout Australia which also makes communication difficult and holding a meeting of all members at the same time almost impossible. However, each member's opinion was sought for the new campaign and each member had a month to comment and give feedback on this campaign to the Turkey Farmers Association of Australia.

3. Emails sent from the Turkey Farmers Association of Australia are also seen to be unprofessional. Due to budget restrictions, many staff are casually employed and student work placements, where students are not paid for their work, are very important to keep the office of the Turkey Farmers Association of Australia running.

With these problems in mind, you undertake research in order to understand these problems more specifically and come up with logical and practical recommendations to solve these problems. As you refine your knowledge of these problems you narrow each one down to one specific issue. So for example for problem one, the issue could be that the members do not understand why decisions are being made. For problem two, the issue could be that members do not feel comfortable asking about decisions made by the Turkey Farmers Association of Australia. As you develop your recommendations you make sure that you clearly link the problems to the solutions (as articulated within the recommendations). Having this information, you now write a memo to all of the members of the Turkey Farmers Association of Australia. You will write the memo based upon the following structure.

1) Opening

a) To:

b) From:

c) Date:

d) Subject:

2) Objectives and background

a) Describe the communication audit process

b) Specific purpose

c) General purpose

3) Problems

a) Problem one-quantitative and qualitative significance

b) Problem two-quantitative and qualitative significance

c) Problem three-quantitative and qualitative significance

4) Action steps to solve the problems

a) Problem one

b) Problem two

c) Problem three

5) Closing

a) Briefly outline a synopsis of the memo

b) Explain the benefit of compliance to the member/employee and/or organisation.

c) Offer assistance and provide contact details

6) References-APA style.