Abigail Gutleben

During my last two weeks at Literacy for Life, I worked in-person at their office in the School of Education and worked through the last bits and pieces of the handbook. I also drafted a number of potential posts for Literacy for Life's social media pages. I experienced a major setback during this time period when my computer completely shut down on me during a meeting with my supervisor. I was panicked and extremely upset (it was a brand new computer!), but my supervisors had a lot of patience and understanding for the issues I was experiencing. I stayed in communication with the team at LFL while I was working from home and given the preparation I had done for the days ahead, they were able to help me pick up the slack.

My last couple of days definitely tugged on my heartstrings. I said my goodbyes to the team during our weekly meeting, and my supervisor made sure to make everyone aware of the work I had done and complimented my work ethic and determination throughout the internship.

Literacy for Life is a wonderful organization doing powerful work for the Williamsburg and James City County communities. This internship really helped me hone my communication and interpersonal skills, and especially helped me problem-solve in light of the personal and professional setbacks due to COVID-19. I am incredibly grateful to have been offered the opportunity to work with the staff at LFL and support their mission.

This week, I had the opportunity to start coming into the office regularly, as my personal circumstances enabled me to get to the School of Education regularly. I've really enjoyed the opportunity to see the staff in person, as I don't get to interact with everybody in a meaningful capacity very often. It's also been very beneficial for my mental health and productivity, as I currently live alone. Working from home is convenient, but as I've discovered this summer, it's taken a toll on my mental health, as I don't often get face-to-face interaction and I don't have my family or friends here in Williamsburg to support me. It's really been a great opportunity to improve my interpersonal communication skills and to just see some smiling faces around the office. This week, I continued to work on the handbook, and also worked on reformatting sponsor logos in Photoshop to make them suitable for posts on social media. I also showed my supervisor how to post to our social media platforms and wrote very detailed tutorials about how to do this in the handbook.

I began the week with a check-in meeting with my supervisor, and then worked with my supervisor and our director to draft a series of thank-you posts for our Reading Between the Wines event sponsors. I also scheduled a meeting with one of our tutors, who authors and publishes our monthly tutor newsletter, to see if there's anything we can pull for future social media posts. I reported the information to my supervisor, and spent the rest of the week working on the handbook and preparing for our upcoming campaign.

This week, my supervisor and I continued to revise our annual social media schedule and our social media handbook. I also drafted a few more "fun" posts for our social media pages that weren't related to our programs. I then took a look at how these posts were doing and analyzed the trends to come up with some insights as to why some succeeded better than others. I plan to add these insights to the handbook.

After returning from vacation, I started the week with a catch-up meeting with my supervisor, and then dived back into my work on our social media handbook. My supervisor and I also began to strategize to come up with more creative posts to grab more eyes on social media, so we have begun searching for stories and events in the local community to post about. With feedback from my supervisor, I drafted a couple of these posts.

This week, after meeting with my supervisor for our weekly check-in, I took on a development task by coming up with a strategy to incorporate information about our Amazon Smile page into our posts. Then, in coordination with our director, my supervisor and I continued to set up the upcoming social media campaign to thank our sponsors on social media. Additionally, I took the opportunity to improve my media and production skills by going into the office and becoming familiar with our camera. I studied the manual and tutorials online to learn how to shoot portrait photos and interviews. I wasn't as successful as I hoped I'd be on my own, but I reached out to a peer of mine who had more expertise, and she was able to walk me through the process. I also took time this week to work on our social media handbook.

This week, I took the opportunity to work "offline" on our Social Media Handbook. I added new sections and revised the existing material, including items that detailed our values, policy, and other general guidelines. To do this, I had to conduct more research on nonprofits and social media, and how to leverage social media platforms to reach out to future donors, learners, tutors, and more. I also took on the task of drafting a yearly schedule for our social media posts. To work around an issue in Excel, I incorporated some back-end code that I sourced online, building on skills I developed in computer sciences courses. It worked successfully, and I prepared the document to present to my supervisor the following week.