My experience as The Comedy Trust's Intern

Hi people!

Although it's hard to believe, today is my final day in my month long Marketing and PR internship. As such, I thought I would write a short blog to share my experience with you :).Well, I say short, but you surprisingly get to do quite a lot of stuff over a month. Anyway, I will do my best to keep it short(ish) and sweet. Overall, it has gone extremely fast, but I have learnt a lot and it has done a good job preparing me for a career in marketing. I have gained some superb experience and improved a number of skills which I am sure will help me in the future. I would like to thank both Sam and Charlene for allowing me to come in and work for such a great organisation.

Editing software

From the outset, I was asked what I wanted to get out of the internship. This was great because the internship was tailored to match what would be the biggest benefit for me. For example, Sam and Charlene knew Digital Marketing was a potential career I wanted to purse. Therefore, they allowed me to gain hands on experience using Adobe Premier Pro, a video editing software. I created a testimonial video of the Feeling Funny course which was taken from Merseytravel employees. Not only was this really interesting and fun to create, it allowed me to hugely improve me editing skills. Before this internship, my video editing skills were very limited, but I am now much confident in using the software. These sort of skills are very important, particularly for Digital Marketing, making this task extremely beneficial for me.

Social media

It goes without saying nowadays, if you want a career in marketing, you need to know and understand social media like the back of your hand. With that being said, having the opportunity to manage the Comedy Trusts social media pages and use them for promotional purposes was both fun and beneficial for me. Comedy and mental health do not always go hand in hand, and it was a great experience for me learning how to tailor the style of my writing depending on the audience. For me it was interesting trying to find the balance between using comedy and trying to make people smile and laugh, and talking about serious issues such as mental health. I enjoyed trying to produce creative and interesting content to try and increase engagement. For example, I enjoyed creating polls on twitter to increase engagement, and scheduling posts to keep the audience updated on what the Comedy Trust is up to. In particular, I enjoyed using national and global days to produce funny and interesting content. National Popcorn Day, Global Belly Laugh Day and Bright Blue Monday are some examples were I used social media to produce interesting content.

Blog

When I began the internship, I was definitely a newbie when it came to blogging. My experience with blogging was few and far between. In fact, I had only ever written one blog before, and I will happily admit, it definitely wont be nominated for any awards any time soon. But I feel I have came along way since then, and I have improved a lot during this short internship. In particular, I have learnt how to write in a more relaxed, chatty informal style. I have been so familiar with writing reports, essays and dissertations at university, at first it takes a little bit of getting used to. Anyway, I wrote a blog called Bright Blue Monday, You should read it.

Email and website

Gaining hands on experience with marketing tools such as Mailchimp for email campaigns and Wix for websites is also something that will no doubt help me in the future. Having the opportunity to create a newsletter and email it out to the mailing list was fun. When I was tasked with updating the Comedy Trusts website, I have to be honest I was slightly apprehensive. Okay more than slightly, I was fearful I would do something wrong or delete something from the website. It turned out I had nothing to worry about, as Charlene showed me the ropes and it wasn't as hard as it looked.

This blog has already went on for longer than I anticipated, and I have only discussed just some of the things I have got up to over the past month. The chances are, you are already bored of reading about my internship, so I will leave it here. If you have made it to reading this part of the blog, congratulations and thank you for reading :). I would like to thank Sam and Charlene again for allowing me to gain such a fun and beneficial experience.

James