Internship

A series of challenges learning and sprints at the finish

Name Image and Likeness (NIL)

NIL is a relatively new rule that the NCAA has passed for athletes to make money from their name, image and likeness as in the past this was not the case. My team was tasked with helping our colleges respective NIL collective. We developed mulitple excel sheets from scratch that amounted to over 500 emails. Which included Alumni chapters, booster, regional and local radio stations. We had to manage all of these contacts and send out marketing emails to gague knowledge of NIL and to gain heir support for the collective. My team and I even compared what our collective was doing to all other collectives across the nation. To which we found that we were drastically behind and needed to change a lot of things to compete with schools for athletes.

Customer Relations Management (CRM)

I and two other people were put in charge of finding a CRM that was both affordable and would allow us to send out blast emails to subscribers for A/B testing. After trying a good many we decided on mailchimp as it met all of our requirements. Furthermore, it allowed us to gather data from the email campaigns to drive our outreach. I created weekly reports of the infromation to showcase the opinions of our subscirbers and showcase their feelings. This as well as making the social media presence more widespread was instrumental in the success of our collective bringing in funding from donors over the summer.

Auxo Gear

Auxo Gear was a brand designed to raise funds for professional athletes charities through selling merchandise. My original summer team laid the groundwork and mapped out our plan of action months before the actual launch.This included reaching out to our athlete, his friends, and his agent. We created mock posts and gave guidelines on what, and when to post as well as subsequent posts on social media. When the time came to launch the internship term was over however I decided to stay longer and finish what my team had worked so hard to do. I took and edited photos for the merchandise, completed the website and branding, and launched the store to give the next set of interns a finished project. And they would just have to follow the launch guidelines we made over the summer.

The Bad & The Ugly

When I stayed past the original time for the internship I discovered a lot of logistical things that some interns that year had messed up. From not configuring websites correctly, not launching websites, not setting up backups for websites and old sites from earlier years that were still up. After I fixed all of this I ran a report of the money that had been wasted which amounted to $2,603.61 in total. And for a company that helps nonprofits, and small businesses that was a lot of money to be losing for things that aren’t being used or because an intern configured something incorrectly.

Conclusion

I learned a lot about the real world and business this summer. Not only about marketing, website creation, and analytics but about following the guidebook on how to do a process. A lot of the behind the scenes work that we did was spent with tech support fixing an issue or looking for best practices so we didn’t lose moeny for the company or our clients. Though I did make some of my own mistakes, I did find that a lot of what we did as far as logistics really mattered as we were dealing with peoples livelyhoods.