Entry #1

Post #1

Date: 6/20/16 - 6/29/16

Activities: Work on Intranet

Technical Information: Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Mail Merge

Reflection: North Carolina Theatre's (NCT) main purpose is to preserve the unique American art form of musical theatre. Also, they are driven to provide broad access to the arts and to entertain and engage diverse audiences. Three missions the organization thrives on is to feed, fortify, and foster. Feed the spirit of local citizens by providing exceptional theatre productions, using the best national, regional and local talent. Fortify the cultural vitality of the region by offering broad access to live theatre, while strengthening economic growth. Foster the next generation of artists and leaders who will become future patrons of the arts through training, performance, and outreach programs. As an intern, I will be exposed to all aspects of nonprofit fund development, such as special events, grant writing, database management, the annual fund, and direct mail campaigns. I am working with six other interns who all are either in college or college grads. Being the only high schooler to serve as an intern here, I feel as if it is my duty to set a great example and to show the organization that there are many bright high schoolers who can complete these tasks just as well as any college student, or even better. They all have never heard of the AOIT program so I was sure to fill them in and they were in awe. I really do feel like this internship is perfect for me. Becoming a film director is my goal in life and being here working at a theatre, to me, feels like the right step forward to getting there.

The first task presented to me was to make an invitation and to create/send an email for VIP ticket buyers for the upcoming play Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I was excited to make the invitation because I have had experience in making cards on my computer so this wasn't going to be new to me. I created the invitation using a template from a website called Greetings Island. Once completed, I presented it to Melanie and she loved it. I moved on to printing 100 copies of the invitation and then packing them into NCT envelopes. I thought I was done until I realized that I needed to put addresses on the envelopes. My supervisor walked me through the steps to creating a mail merge and then I used Microsoft Excel to get the list of people who bought VIP tickets and their mailing information. This took longer than I expected it to which caused me to have to stay an extra hour to complete it.

On the other hand, creating an email to send out to to the VIP ticket buyers wasn’t something I was familiar with. I didn’t quite know how to setup the email or know completely what to say in it. Instead of going straight to my internship supervisor, Melanie, I looked up examples of business emails. I wanted to give it a try before asking for help right away. I found something that I could feed off of and used that. I ended up sending my draft to Melanie and it was good from there.

Although this took some time, I’m glad I could contribute in helping the organization get ready for this play.