Summer internship, five weeks, one rule: everyone in the team teaches something different. Welcome Freya, a bright and ambitious Physiological Sciences student who spent the summer asking us brilliant questions, getting stuck into all aspects of agency life, and landing some pretty good shots at pétanque.
We’ve changed our approach to interns, using a mini-rotation framework to give our intern maximum exposure to the team, and to the breadth of work we do across the board. Freya could try a bit of everything, bring her own ideas, and see how the agency joins up.
In a small agency you get to do a lot of things. You also get to see how the dots connect. And that’s where we find a lot of creativity, and ways to accelerate success between us. So, we’re writing this like the old game of consequences: one person adds a paragraph, folds the paper, passes it on. By the end we’ll unfold the whole thing and see how the pieces sit together.
Week one — Innovation & new media
Freya spent her first week with me, Beth, Associate Director at EatMoreFruit.
I wanted to start with the future of PR. Mostly because it’s a really exciting time to be in the industry. It feels like collectively we’re all trying to figure out and map the new ways of showing up for people with credible, verified information…which in healthcare PR is critically important.
We focused on how media is changing: why our new media lists include AI-citations, RCT-reviewing TikTokers, and sassy brand voices. Despite the future of the industry being a big unknown, our internship week was still practical and deliberate.
We mapped digital PR across the funnel. We dug into website schema, because the boring bits matter and actually, can be a great prompt for creativity about how we can tell the same stories in different and accessible ways.
We checked which six to eight sources Google keeps quoting in niche areas of medicine.
We Venn-diagrammed influencers, media medics, UGC creators, and journalists to find sweet spots.
We call that ‘E-E-A-TMoreFruit’.
We ran social and search listening. Reddit and Amazon reviews give you unfiltered insight. Instagram shows the aspirational version. Matching them up feels like listening to two people describe the same holiday: one tells you the flight was late, the other posts the sunset.
We talked zero-click searches and generative engine optimisation (GEO). Freya learned to track competitor activity with the tools we actually use.
I wanted week one to set the tone, a way of thinking about innovation and opportunities for the whole scope of PR-related services. We’re a boutique consultancy. That means everyone wears many hats and can catch any ball. But we also have our quiet obsessions. So instead of squeezing “the future of PR” into the last week, we brought the future in on day one.
Over to Rachel next, she’ll take week two and introduce media strategy for a US medical device evidence launch.
Week 2 – Media strategy (with Rachel)
For her second week, Freya got hands-on with one of PR’s core skills: building a media strategy. And we had the perfect live brief to work with.
Our client, a global medical technology company, had just published a meta-analysis they wanted to share with the cardiovascular and orthopaedic worlds. The data was powerful, but data alone doesn’t travel – it needs the right story, tailored to the right people, through the right channels. Freya’s task: to help build a plan that would make it land.
Step one: mapping audiences. Healthcare stories rarely speak only to clinicians. We worked together to identify the full spectrum of stakeholders: HCPs, payors, procurement teams, hospital management, investors, and insurers. Each group looks at the same study through a different lens, and each requires a different hook.
Step two: identifying ‘new’ channels. As Beth touched on in week one, a strategy today goes far beyond a list of journals. We showed Freya how to extend research into podcasts, social platforms, and even AI citations – making sure the study surfaced not just in the news, but in the outputs of Large Language Models (LLMs). Along the way, she learned why SEO, backlinks, and domain authority matter as much as coverage.
Step three: shaping the story. Together, we ran a storytelling workshop. Freya saw first-hand that one size never fits all in PR. The same dataset could become a clinical breakthrough for specialists, an efficiency case for procurement, or a financial opportunity for investors. By tailoring key messages per audience, we created a suite of targeted pitches.
By the end of Week Two, Freya had experienced both the bread and butter of PR and the new dynamics shaping it. Traditional media strategy still matters – but now it’s interwoven with social, search, and AI.
Week 3 – The value of collaboration with Gabriel
This week was about connection. Sitting down with Freya, we delved into how influence, credibility and trust are built through meaningful collaboration and explored the world of medical, health and professional associations – the organisations that unite experts, set clinical direction and give shape to the conversations that move healthcare forward.
As an agency, we are uniquely positioned to help associations shine a light on the vital work they do – from education and advocacy to research and community building. We designed the week’s activities around understanding how these partnerships work, what makes them valuable, how they grow trust and how creativity can elevate their influence.
Activity 1: Finding the heartbeat (learning and insights)
We began the week by exploring the driving force behind medical and professional associations – their missions, members and movements. Picking 2-3 associations, Freya learnt how each organisation connects with its community, from education and congresses to advocacy and awareness campaigns, and how agencies like ours can support purposeful storytelling and collaboration.
Activity 2: Building the bridge (strategic thinking)
Next, we looked at how collaboration becomes strategy. Together, we analysed how these partnerships open trusted pathways between science, policy and practice, enabling industry to contribute meaningfully to education and innovation and most importantly…patient outcomes.
Activity 3: Bringing it to life (engagement)
To round off the week, we transformed learning into something tangible – an infographic, showing how creativity and credibility can thrive together when rooted in purpose.
Week 4 – Data, sell ins and hooks
Freya spent her week with me, Libi Stein, account executive, diving into the data side of PR, turning insights into stories.
We started with looking at raw survey results, breaking them down to find what really stood out. Not just the obvious headline stats, but the small percentage shifts and quiet contradictions that say something real about how people think and behave. We talked about what makes a finding interesting and what makes it credible.
Next came storytelling – how to turn those insights into something that will catch a journalist’s eye and used across different audiences. We coached her to be able to develop news hooks, to frame data so it feels relevant and human, and to create a killer pitch that lands.
By the end of the week, we’d covered the full journey from spreadsheet to story, and beyond.
Week 5 – Content is king (with Lily)
After a month at EatMoreFruit, Freya spent her fifth week with me – Lily, account manager – delving into the world of content production. A dynamic and exciting part of what we do, I brought Freya along in the process of preparation for a patient testimonial film for one of our MedTech clients.
With any healthcare project, compliance and regulations are key. Freya had a deep dive into how we operate in a restricted environment and how we build in regulatory across project milestones to ensure any content we create is compliant. And the best way to understand this is to get stuck into a live project. Freya was tasked to review a suite of newly created social media influencer videos for a sports medicine product – a highly regulated area.
Working with production partners means that our pre-production process needs to be airtight. Freya supported us from beginning to fruition – working on filming schedules, storyboard development and shot lists, through to content briefs and logistics.
By the end of the week, Freya was fully versed on the process behind bringing healthcare stories to life and just how much collaboration, preparation, and strategic thinking it takes to execute great content.
Five weeks flew past and Freya left to ready for her return to Uni. The start of another exciting adventure – her third and final year of her degree. Good luck Freya!
