This is a guest post by Sara Hollinshead, former intern at Pace Community Action Agency. She is a student at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College.
This semester I had the privilege to be a marketing intern at Pace Community Action Agency’s corporate office in Vincennes, Ind. Some of my responsibilities were to provide new marketing and advertisement strategies for Pace. Pace is a local not-for-profit Community Action Agency that offers services in three counties – Knox, Sullivan and Daviess. Because Pace is a Community Action Agency, it supports area programs that are beneficial to the community. Underneath this Pace organization umbrella are several programs including Head Start, WIC, Energy Assistance, Neighborhood Stabilization, and even for profit businesses like CaptTech Consulting.
One of my duties at this internship was to come up with different marketing strategies for various events that Pace was sponsoring and implement those strategies. One area where I thought Pace could use expansion was its use of media relations. During this semester I made connections for Pace with local TV news media, accessed web based community boards to advertise various events and coordinated with Vincennes University to have their media students cover an event for Pace. I wrote an article covering a National Award that Pace won in August of 2012. With the article project I also was in charge of creating the design and layout of the article that was submitted to Hoosier Family Living.
One of Paces’ immediate goals was to develop a strategy to accurately reflect the professionalism of Paces’ operations. Hosting the Chamber of Commerce Breakfast Bandwagon was one of their strategies to reach the business community. It was my responsibility to design and implement a display that reflects the energy and professionalism of Pace. I was also responsible for creating a background slide show complete with motivating music to “tell the story of Pace.”
One of the marketing strategies I came up with for Pace was branding for their core values. Pace wanted to market itself as a respected member of the business community, and I felt that branding their core values would help. iRiPE stands for Pace’s core values and is an acronym for Innovation-Respect-Integrity-Professionalism-Excellence. Bertha, Pace’s CEO, began the branding process by including the iRiPE core values into the Chamber of Commerce presentation. I continued the branding by including the iRiPE core values in the magazine article I wrote for Hoosier Family Living.
There were many challenges during this internship and many firsts. Some were learning market strategizing. It can be nerve-racking to speak up during management staff meetings and to share your ideas. I found the experience very rewarding.
Through this internship, I was able to write my first magazine article and design the page layout for it. By the end of my internship with Pace, I have built up my confidence level in regards to being able to create and implement effective marketing strategies. I discovered that I truly enjoy the field of marketing and public relations and would enjoy this as a permanent career.
