Helping stuff envelopes to send to donors, wishing them a Happy Holiday.
In my internship with the Office of Institutional Advancement, I was responsible for creating videos to send to those who have donated to my school, at times the videos were made for a specific donor while others were for multiple donors. Such videos include a birthday video, thank you videos, and more, each of these videos were sent to our donors to show our appreciation for all they have given. Along with creating videos I also create cards, such as birthday cards, I sent reminders to the donors to attend events, and thank you cards to show our appreciation.
For the internship, the skills that I used multiple times were good communication skills, time management skills, customer service skills, film editing skills, and computer skills. I needed to be able to clearly communicate with colleagues and other professionals when making videos and cards, I also needed to manage my time well since I had multiple projects and other school work. Through the process of this internship, I gained a greater sense of hospitality as it relates to professionalism, providing good hospitality to alumni means greeting them with a smile and making them feel welcomed as soon as they enter the campus. I also had the opportunity to further expand my video editing skills with all the video projects that I did this semester, along with my computer skills when writing letters, creating cards and sending emails.
Editing a video to send to the donors.
Through this internship, I gained more confidence in my work with editing, creative designs, and expanding my professional vocabulary. I was always worried that my ideas for cards or videos were not what donors were looking for, but after my time in the Office of Institutional Advancement, I have come to realize that what I create is made for people to enjoy. Below are some examples of the projects I have completed during my internship.
This video is the first one I produced for Mrs. Pairet; it took a little longer to create because I did not really know what would be best to send to the donors of Longwood. I did not quite understand what the donors would want to see, but I tried to think as if I was an alum and what I would want to see. As a result, I went for the sense of nostalgia and happiness, as a student you have times of laughter, fun times around campus, and excitement of new things in Longwood so I went around campus looking for those types of things, I did not want just students saying thank you, I wanted it to be more meaningful, so I asked students what they were thankful for, of course, some did not know what to say but luckily other did. Once I had the clips I wanted I put them together in an appealing manner and to accurately show what I wanted the donors to see in the video, it took a little time to find the right way that I wanted it to look like, but after some tinkering I finally made the video look that way I wanted.
This video was a collaboration with another intern in the office Haleigh Pannell, we were told to create a video for first-time donors to show our appreciation for their generous contributions. At first we wanted to find pictures of Longwood’s very first things, like it’s very first basketball game, very first Color Wars, very first Convocation, etc., but once we realize it would be a little difficult to find those we decided to remember our firsts at Longwood game, color wars, convocation, and more, we came up with some ideas and pitched them to Mrs. Pairet, she agreed so it was up to me to find the content that would go into the video. I searched for the pictures I wanted, which took a while, though the other videos took some time to create this one was not as bad, the pictures were hard to find but that was the hardest thing about the video. Since this was the first video with a lot of pictures I asked one of my professors for advice as to how I should proceed with them after that everything ran smoothly with little trouble.
The Office of Institutional Advancement holds its annual Scholarship Day on November 7. This is a 24-hour event where donors give gifts to mainly scholarships, the whole office is lively and monitoring the donations. My job with this video was to look at this event’s statistics and create a video to send out to the donors who gave gifts to Longwood’s scholarships. Another intern at the office and I went around asking the students to take pictures holding a sign that said “Thank You” to add a more personal appeal to the video. My mentor Mrs. Pairet gave me the statistics of the Scholarship Day and told me to pick the most important ones that the donors would like to see. Once those were chosen, I then came up with the order of them and the style of how they would appear and made sure that the video was appealing and slow enough where people could read it with ease. After some adjustments asked by Mrs. Pairet, I uploaded it to the office’s YouTube site, ThankView, to be sent to the donors.
This project was difficult to complete though it was just a card, I had to remake it multiple times and made several different types of cards for Mrs. Pairet to choose. After picking the top card, I did the revisions that Mrs. Pairet wanted, but once they were done, I was asked to fix a few more things. At first, I was using my Canva, a site where you can design multiple kinds of things, from birthday cards to posters, the revisions she wanted me to do required me to have a subscription to Canva, which I did not have. Luckily Dustyn Hall was kind enough to let me use his, I was able to make the necessary changes, but it still needed more. The ones that I sent to be printed had small things that I needed to fix each time it was sent out, but finally, I made the perfect card that was approved by printing services and Mrs. Pairet.
This was another card that I had to do, this one was a little easier than the birthday card, I was able to use Dustyn’s Canva again. Haleigh and I went out the ask students if they would be willing to take a picture holding a thank you sign for the donors who had given their fist gift to Longwood to show our appreciation to them for contributing to the university. At first Haleigh designed a card but I was also asked to make one too, I made multiple to have many different options for Mrs. Pairet to choose from. Since the first card that I had to make at the beginning of my internship was more difficult than I would have liked, this one went a lot more smoothly, with few adjustments to it.