Week 11: Training and Formatting

This is the prompt from week 8, as I previously completed the week 9 prompt and am not yet on my final week.

One of my co-workers has resigned, and will be leaving next week. I will be doing a portion of her work until the NWRA fills her position. So, she trained me all this week on her duties. I got an in-depth look at how to manage our website. It was surprising to me how complicated website design and upkeep can be. There is a ton of code that goes into building a website, and technology is often finicky, resulting in problems that take hours to fix. I now know that if I ever want to do web design, I’ll have to learn HTML. But I can still edit, proofread, and create content for websites which I’d prefer doing.

I’ve been doing a lot of formatting and condensing e-blasts, pdfs, board reports, and toolkits. A company usually has multiple programs that they use for communication purposes, such as Protech and Exact Target, and you have to master those in order to send emails out to members. The hard part is not creating the perfect wording, it’s formatting the words and images on these platforms. I spent so much time figuring out how to properly space a table on Exact Target — it was quite frustrating. Researching is also a big aspect of my internship. My boss asked me to research female executives to be speakers at our Women’s Council Convention, and I dug up possible candidates, spent a lot of time calling and convincing receptionists/operators to give me contact information, and crafting an enticing email. At the end, I was surprised that my boss wanted me to personally call the candidates and invite them to be speakers. I was flattered, because it meant that she believed I was capable of communicating the logistics of the event and persuading the people to speak.

One highlight of my week was going out to dinner with 3 of my co-workers. We had so much fun and I learned a lot more about what the NWRA does and how it operates. I’m really going to miss the friends I’ve made here!