Team experience and communication in organ donation presentation

¶ … Integrated Marketing Communication

Critical Assessment and Reflection

Group IMC Presentation Discussion

Our organ donation presentation team members are: Dadan, Aman, and I. I think we really connected as a team and we were really successful at understanding each other's way of thinking. Although we all came from different cultures like China, India and Saudi Arabia, we managed to easily reach consensus every time we worked together. I can evaluate our team experience as a very pleasant and fully enjoyable one. Although every member of our group has their strong and weak points we tried to take advantage of this matter in a positive way and we tried to use everyone's strong point in the exact part of the presentation that required it. For instance, Dadan was really good at finding articles and information that we could use in our presentation, while Aman was very good at creating graphics that could explain our point-of-view. As for me, it seems I was good at making sure that everything was in the right order and at organising all ideas in an appropriate way.

Communication within our team mainly took place on Facebook and by email and texting. We have also organised three meetings, all of them held at Griffith University. Preparations for the presentation played an important part in developing our language skills, and also improved the skill of working with other people, socialising, accepting others' opinions and respecting them.

An important part of our work was represented by the feedback we received. Although all team members considered our presentation was complete and organized efficiently, it seems several aspects should have been emphasized more during the planning step. The perspective offered by our colleagues and professor was very useful in making us understand the limitations of the presentation.

The positive feedback we received from our peers has acknowledged our hard work with the presentation and increased confidence in our skills. This was extremely important on individual, but also on group level. I think all team members were assessed individually, which gave us a lot to think about our performance, and also as a group. The evaluation we received on our presentation also refers to our abilities of working as a group. I think this was a very useful experience for us in helping us understand what being part of a team means.

The utility of this experience will be most obvious when we will be hired by companies and will have to work as part of different teams. Being a valuable team member is not an innate ability, but something that is achieved through practice. And this is exactly what we did for this presentation. We all took our roles within the team very seriously, and I think this was expressed by the smooth flow of our presentation.

Overall, I think our presentation went on very smoothly and according to plan. I am especially proud of having been able to correctly assess every team member's strong points and limitations and to assign each task accordingly. I think the most important factor that determined the success of our presentation is represented by the good communication we had within the team.

2. IMC Course Learning Discussion

2.2. Articles Discussion

One of the assignments I had to perform for our presentation was to find articles on organ donation. I found two interesting articles that helped me inform the team about the topic and that also helped us decide on how to approach the issue. One of these articles was written by Dick Teresi, was published in the Wall Street Journal and is titled "What you lose when you sign that donor card." The information I found in the article was very important to me as a student, and even more important to me as a possible donor. The article provides information on how organs are harvested, on the possibility of donors feeling pain when their organs are harvested, and on different studies revealing the faults of medical procedures declaring patients brain-dead.

I think this is important information that everyone should know. If communicated properly, it could be an important point of focus. I think donors' situation during harvesting is an area that is given little importance by the media. Therefore, communication efforts into sending such information should be intensified. What I've learned in the IMC course can also lead me to the conclusion that players in the organ donation business do not want this information reaching the public. This makes such a communication project even more challenging.

Another interesting article I found was posted on Mayo Clinic's website, was written by its staff, and refers to the myths people associate with organ donation. The article was not necessarily interesting because of the information it presented, but because of the point-of-view it was written from. According to the article, the most important myths on organ donation refer to patients' worries that doctors will not be as interested in their situation if they decide to donate their organs, on how donors are declared brain-dead, on religion issues, on the age of the donor, and others. I think the article does not present scientific evidence to really back debunking these myths. The language and style are easy to understand, but I think a more official and formal style would be more appropriate. In addition to this, reading this article I thought that the writer really wanted to debunk these myths and persuade people to donate their organs instead of providing scientific data that could help people make an informed decision about this. I think this article is important in helping us understand how large players in this industry work on persuading people to donate, how they communicate with the public, and what communication methods they use.

2.3. Personal Key Learning Summary

I think the Integrated Marketing Communication course was one of the most interesting and complex courses I have yet attended. The most important thing about this course is that it seemed to really put together all the information I got from other marketing courses. I also think this was a very practical course that helped me develop my marketing skills.

The presentation we had to develop and sustain on organ donation was very important on different levels. On one level it allowed us the possibility to put into practice the knowledge we gained from this course and to efficiently communicate our point-of-view on the topic. On another level it showed us what it is like to work on a team. We had to be supervisors and team members at the same time, which I think is a great experience.

In addition to this, having the chance to evaluate other colleagues' performance was a great way of using information learned from this course. This information will be of great use in the marketing career I intend to follow. My opinion is that more courses should be this interactive because this improves communication, it helps people work as teams, and it favours cultural exchange between people.

This course was also helpful in determining us to develop our planning, organizing and presentation skills. These are skills that everyone needs in their work. It is important that we had a chance to use them, evaluate them, and determine what needs to be done in order to improve them. I think this is a very useful and interesting course and I recommend it to everyone that wants to develop on personal and professional level.