Work, Play and Social Good Matters

By Matter

What do I love most about public relations? People work hard to play hard. PR people are a special breed – including us “agency-folk” working with several clients at once. As Sam Fletcher recently pointed out, PR execs are listed as having the seventh most stressful job out there according to this year’s CareerCast survey. That said, we here at Matter have endeavored to find the balance between work and play, with a special emphasis on social good.

Take, for example, our holiday party this year. Before we departed for a long break, we gathered for a celebration of the great year we had. Because we were fortunate enough to have family and friends join us for a night of food, drink and dance, we wanted to make sure we were still productive with our time – as PR professionals often do. In the fast-changing world of PR, we don’t have a minute to spare so we have to make them all count. With that in mind, we collected Toys for Tots donations at the door and delivered all leftovers from our meal to the Salvation Army for lunch the next day.

I feel grateful to work at a company that has such a strong belief in giving back. Too often do we get sucked into the craziness of work, and forget to come up for air. I hope that 2012 will bring even more charitable activities here at Matter, but in the meantime, these were my favorite highlights of 2011:

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Care Packages for Marines: My amazing coworkers put together 11 boxes of goodies for my brother and his platoon who were deployed in Afghanistan.

 

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Jeanne Geiger Walk Against Violence: Matter made a financial donation for this cause and participated in a 5k walk around Newburyport to raise awareness of domestic violence.

 

What do you do to balance out work? Any cool social-good opportunities you think we should look in to?