Community Interns

Kara

Howdy folks! I'm lucky enough to have a part-time intern supporting our community initiatives, and I'm about to onboard a new person (new person every semester!). I have not had trouble finding community maintenance work and other "meaty" projects to keep them busy, but just wondering... if any of you have interns, what sort of community management work do you involve them in?

Also, if you happen to know any college students who'd be interested in a community internship (remote OK), please invite them reach out to me (kara.adams@foundant.com) or keep any eye on our careers page!

Alex Dunne

Hi @Kara ,

Following this thread for inspiration. My role is potentially shifting slightly and that may require getting a junior person to help me out in the Community. I'm trying to figure out what are some things I could hand off to them so I'm interested in any replies you get!

Alex

Kara

@Alex Dunne That's exciting! I really enjoy working with my interns. I use Jira for task management...I know there are lots of tools like it out there, but this one functions like a post-it board of tasks in columns of To-Do, Need Help, In Progress, and Done. It makes me much less of a helicopter boss and the interns like the visual aspect.

I get a new intern every semester so every 3-4 months, and that includes a month-long onboarding, so it is a bit of a timesuck, with a gap in additional community support, so just something to keep in mind!

Right now my interns help support daily, weekly, monthly tasks and some larger projects. Examples:

• Daily: move conversations, edit conversations, add hashtags, approve members, assign badges, approve badges
• Weekly: check analytics to note what's trending, top users, anything out-of-the-ordinary (too many unanswered questions, long response time, etc.) Some of these interns are way more into stats than I am, so this is helpful!
• Monthly: write/build/send community newsletter (this one is a big lift every month), check for winners of our Referral contest, check for winners of our Caramels for Comments contest, meet with our social media coordinator with new ideas/trends
• One-off projects: member audits, data entry, creating badges, creating pockets, supporting groups/special events as they arise (i.e. in-person events supported by community conversations)

I try to make the one-off projects as "meaty" as possible, because - while data entry needs to get done - no intern wants to spend their time doing that and not learning about other aspects of the company.

I'm always looking for more ideas for "intern enrichment", but I hope this is helpful!