Experience Intern
- The Venture Café Philadelphia Experience Intern
- The University City Science Center is the largest and oldest urban research park in the country. The Venture Café team works under the Convene Pillar of this Non-profit. Venture Café’s showcases events every Thursday 3-8 PM and are always free and open to the public. The community is comprised of a diverse group of entrepreneurs, business owners, experts, program directors, artists, and students. I was offered an internship position to continue into the fall and have accepted the offer. I look forward to creating better connections with Temple University and University City Science Center and Venture Café in this upcoming semester.
- The primary role was to support the preparation and experience execution of the Venture Café Thursday Gatherings. The intern will assist with website design and improvement of user experience via Salesforce. Daily use of CRM and Mailchimp with aims to improve multi-channel integration. Worked in tandem with the Venture Café team to execute engagement activities to support the innovation and entrepreneurial community.
- In charge of sending out newsletters to the community through MailChimp. Make updates and system improvements through Salesforce for the Venture Cafe Website. After each event, run event audits and analyze audience trends weekly. Lastly, run all the social media accounts to boost audience engagement.
- Projects
- Project: Research, Implement, Test UX design of Speaker Form of the Venture Cafe website. Communicated daily with the Creative Lead at the Global Venture Café network to work on improving the usability of this imperative aspect of the website. Conducted User Tests with a small cohort to ensure the quality of the form. Successfully improved the form and is now ready to be sent out to future speakers.
- Social Media: Spearheaded a grand social media push towards reintroducing Venture Cafe Philadelphia for new and old community members. Involve extensive planning, designing a visual slide deck to post on social media accounts as well as collaborating with the team to record videos to input in this project. Increased community engagement on Instagram by 98% over a one-month period and across all social media, was able to increase engagement by 78%, in one month on average.
- What I learned
- During my internship, I learned how to use the most widely used customer relationship management platform – Salesforce. In my MIS 2901 course, we were taught about CRM\’s and their various uses across companies\’ departments. Not only did I get to learn how Salesforce can be used to power an entire website (the Venture Cafe website) but also how it tracks/collects data. I learned how to implement different systems within salesforce to automate the signup process. I was able to meet with other departments and learn what CMS they have implemented as well. I was also able to apply my knowledge of HTML (learned in MIS 2901) to the website and learned how to apply in within Salesforce.
- Lastly, I learned not to be afraid to reach out to other departments and employees for help or a coffee chat. It\’s the best way to network and get a better understanding of the company you\’re working for as a whole.