Day 18: Wednesday July 24th 9am to 5pm

Last week I was unable to come into the office, because I was at the beach! The beach is my absolute favorite place, and it was great to spend a week there with my best friend and our mom's. And of course on the way back we stopped in DC for the weekend to see baby Talia. She's getting so big! (Pictures below)

When I got back to work on Wednesday, I had a bunch of various jobs to work on. The first was the Day of Giving. I went through the YW's profile from last year to make all the updates I could. I changed the list of names under the board of directors, editing the programing, and even the statement from the CEO. Laura, who normally fills out information like this, helped me determine a budget number to include and make sure that I had everything correct. 

My next job was working on request letters for the Young Leaders Board event, Cocktails for a Cause. I had previously completed a mail merge for the companies for which I had contact information. But, there were some companies without any. I created a more general letter and did research to find the proper department at each company. I then addressed these letters to a Manager within that department and sent them out hoping for a response. 

After a few other random jobs, I spent the rest of my day creating a PowerPoint template for the entire YWCA Greater Pittsburgh to use. Consistency has been an issue within the YW's communications, and Ellen thought that if all PowerPoints were created within the same template, we could start to create a consistent look for the organization. It turned out really well. I based it off of the YWCA USA's official PowerPoint template, yet made it our own. 

Fun Facts by Ellen:

• Always search for the answer, read everything, and double check, before asking. 
  

Day 16: Monday July 8th 9am to 5pm

After sending some emails, finishing EITC packets, working on a project for the Young Leaders Board, and sending postcards to new members, Courtney, Ellen, and I had a meeting about social media. During this meeting, we talked about the best way to manage our social media outs, collect content, and organize that content. It was definitely a pretty stressful meeting. Ellen pushed me very hard to figure out the best way to layout the Communications Calendar and make it easy enough for other employees to understand and contribute to. On Wednesday, I spent much of the day putting this together. 

Day 17: Wednesday July 10th 9am to 5pm

We ended up coming up with one Excel document, with several tabs. The first of which is the summary sheet. This has the dates running across the top and events and topics down the left side. Blocks of color are used to indicate on what date a specific topic or event should be promoted. The rest of the tabs are for the Constant Contact email, Twitter, Facebook, and the website. I had the liberty of setting up the Twitter and Facebook tabs. 

On each tab the weeks are listed with the number of blank spaces for the amount of posts that should occur that week. Across the top are columns for date, time, topic, copy, graphics, and links. This basically keeps all of the information for each post organized and in one place. The Twitter and Facebook tabs look very similar. 

We also decided in this meeting to start utilizing HootSuite more. This allows someone to spend one chunk of time per week to post all of the social media content and schedule it to come out when desired. It's really a great website to use for social media for an organization. 

Day 15: Wednesday July 3rd 9am to 5pm

On Monday, I took a surprise day off after the first Great Grandchild was born on my mom's side of the family. We took a spur of the moment trip to Washington, D.C. to see baby Talia! She is beautiful! 

Now back to my internship... This Wednesday started off a bit different that normal. The Heinz Endowments has a program for youth to give out grants to fund projects they are passionate about. The theme is sustainability. On Tuesday, I got a call from Ellen about an information session Wednesday morning that someone needed to attend to get the RFP (request for proposal). She thought I would enjoy the experience, so I went to represent the YWCA. 

The session was at the Children's Museum. Each group of high school students presented their ideas from projects to the people interested in applying for them and then information was collected to receive the RFP. It was interesting to hear about everyone's ideas and see several people from Shaler (my alma mater). One project perfectly fit with our TechGYRLS program, so we are going to apply. 

I completed a bunch of tasks this day once I got into the office. It was a very busy week. I prepped for a social media meeting with Ellen and Courtney on Monday morning. I reviewed our membership research to present at the meeting as well. I also made some more of the EITC packets, since they ran out last week. And right before I left I started a mail merge to ask for donations for the Young Leaders Board event Cocktails for a Cause. 

The main portion of my day was spent editing the content on our Pittsburgh Foundation Day of Giving profile. This day encourages people to give to registered non-profits by matching a portion of their gifts. 

Fun Facts by Ellen:
Ellen took the time to explain the four types of foundations to me.

1. Private - created by individuals, own board, own mission statement
2. Corporate - sometimes independent of the actual corporation. Ex. Alcoa. Sometimes they are tied to the profit and loss statement of the company. This makes the amount donated smaller and less consistant. 
3. Community - involved in giving back. A lot of individual foundations make it up. Community foundation manages them financially. Has investors. Development officers encourage people to establish funds. Giving officers determine who gets grants. Can be as small as $10,000 to invest. 
4. Company - established through companies. Trusts. Wealthy people give money to investment companies and the companies give to organizations. 

Day 13: Monday June 24th - 9am to 5pm

This day was basically a repeat of last Wednesday. I worked some more to develop our social media and schedule posts for the upcoming week. 

Day 14: Wednesday June 26th - 9am to 3:30pm

Below are some pictures from the EITC folders I put together for Laura and Ellen to send to local technology companies asking for a donation. The Educational Improvement Tax Credit allows companies to donate $100,000 to an approved non-profit program and write off $90,000 on their taxes. This is where a huge portion of the TechGYRLS program funding comes from. 

One of the sheets in the folders were printed at AlphaGraphics, so I got to go on a bit of a walk to pick them up as well as drop off a few things along the way. I put together about 25 of these folders and then did some research on companies to send them to. The YW has a list of companies that they solicite every year, but this year we worked on a new list. There were about 105 companies that I went through and found contact information for. I was also responsible for determining the ask amount. I researched stock prices and the company size to determine the amount we should ask for on these "cold calls". 

The next step was to  create a mail merge of the solicitation letter with the information from the spreadsheet. I had never done a mail merge before, so this was a great skill to learn.

Fun Facts by Ellen:

• Always enter data into a spread sheet in the smallest and most consistent fields. This makes a mail merge much easier.