During my internship with the League of Vermont Writers, I was supervised by the Immediate Past President and the Vice President of the organization. We typically maintained a biweekly meeting schedule, which allowed me to complete stretches of work independently while still facilitating opportunities for mentorship.
My supervisors and I set three goals for my internship:
- Expand my writing portfolio
- Apply my editing skills by developing a blog post series from concept to completion
- Gain hands-on experience in social media marketing by implementing new campaigns
I fulfilled each of these goals, earning positive feedback from my direct supervisors and from the President of the League. Further descriptions of my work are included below.
Portfolio Expansion
The League includes summaries of craft talks from its quarterly programs in its newsletter. I wrote the summaries for the two talks I attended in January. They were edited by the managing editor of the newsletter and included in both the print and virtual editions.
Editorial skills
The League wanted more content for their blog. Champlain College students wanted opportunities to publish their work. I wanted the chance to hone my editing skills. I satisfied all of these desires by creating a Champlain student blog post series for the League’s blog. Posts answered one of two prompts: what is the most valuable lesson you have learned at Champlain so far? or what in the state of Vermont inspires you to write? To prepare this series for publication, I took the following steps.
- I drafted a call for submissions and an accompanying graphic which I posted to various social media channels and class email lists.
- I communicated with interested writers regarding deadlines and expectations.
- I developed a style sheet to govern the project.
- I edited the posts as they were submitted and sent changes to the authors for approval.
- I selected photos to accompany each post.
These twelve blog posts will be included on the League’s website.
Social media marketing
I worked directly with the Vice President to develop social media campaigns for the League’s accounts. I used Canva to create graphics and Hootsuite to schedule content into Facebook, Twitter, and eventually Instagram. (I created an Instagram account for the League in April.) I also developed a style sheet for the posts which specified decisions such as font spacing, color scheme, etc.
- #MondayMotivation posts featured quotes about writing.
- #WriterWednesday posts served as shout-outs to individual League members.
- #LeagueLinesLive posts drove traffic to blog posts by featuring a pull quote from published posts.
Below are some statistics about the engagement my posts received in their first five weeks.
- Twitter
- Profile visits increased by 8.9%
- Highest engagement rate of 4.2%
- Average engagement rate of 2% (platform average is 0.0048%)
- Average impressions of 213 each
I learned a lot more about social media marketing through HubSpot courses. The tracks I completed include:
- Business Blogging Course: Attracting and Monetizing an Audience Through Content
- Developing an End-to-End Instagram Marketing Strategy For Your Business
- Measuring Brand Engagement and Emotional Connection
- Graphic Design Essentials: Easy Steps for Creating Your Own Compelling Visuals
To download a pdf summary of this portfolio, click below.
Stephanie Hauer 