Week
in an Unfamiliar Environment and Shore2Summit
For
my week in an unfamiliar environment I worked for a Zürich based charity called
Shore 2 Summit. In January I had
organized to help a human rights lawyer with her campaign to raise awareness of
fair trade products and specifically chocolate. Unfortunately she ended up
moving to Singapore so I had to come up with another week in an unfamiliar
environment plan very quickly. I researched multiple charities and contacted
them regarding summer work. Unfortunately many already had volunteers but I
persevered and finally got in contact with Shore2Summit. Shore2Summit mission
is “to help improve social
and economic conditions around the world by providing a simple way for people
to identify short-term volunteer opportunities in their local neighborhoods or
in other locations around the world when they travel for holiday or business.”
I was attracted to Shore2Summit because their mission really inspired me, I
really enjoy volunteering and they offer short term volunteering where anyone
can make a big impact. Shore2Summit interviewed me by phone and asked me if I
could spend a week, Researching non-profits, NGOs and social businesses
that they can market our services to, prepare their new CRM (customer
relationship management) tool with existing list of potential non-profits (and
new from above research) and
create
draft new email in MailChimp. These were all very new and foreign tasks to me.
I hadn’t ever heard of CRM tools before or worked with Mailchimp so I spent a
lengthy period getting to grips with the software and learning the ropes. I met
with the founder of Shore2Summit, Jennifer DeMattia and she got me started with
all the log ins and information. Everyone who works for Shore2Summit work fall
time at other jobs so Shore2Summit is essentially run by volunteers. They
didn’t have an office building but met at the Hub, a creative, collaborative
space in the Viadukt. After I had been given my task and the tools for it I
went ahead and got to work. Initially I encountered a couple of problems with
the software but after lots of emails and research I managed to iron most of
the problems out. The biggest reoccurring problem I had was communicating with
Jennifer and her team as they were all very busy and it was difficult to ask
for feedback on my work and make sure I was on track. I really enjoyed learning
how to use new software.
Here are some of the softwares I used:
No comments:
Post a Comment