My Role
My official title within the City of Literature team has been Communications Co-ordinator, meaning I have been assisting our Communications Manager, Michelle. As a Communications Co-ordinator, my main role over the past month has been creating a variety of content for our social media, largely graphics for Facebook and Instagram, but also video content for Instagram and TikTok. I have also assisted with other types of communication, such as helping with the planning for our monthly newsletter and drafting various blog posts.
Developing Skills
As previously mentioned, a lot of what I’ve gotten up to in these last four weeks has been making graphics for Instagram and Facebook. This was a great opportunity to bring my pre-existing skills that I had developed- last year at university I was the publicity secretary for a society, so I was somewhat familiar with creating social media posts. Even so, this is definitely an area that I’ve been able to develop new skills in. For example, our City of Literature social media accounts are well curated, with a strong, cohesive colour scheme and style. Striking the balance between creating new designs whilst ensuring that they fit our branding was a challenge, but one that I’ve definitely got to grips with over these past few weeks.
Alongside this, I also got the opportunity to fully create my own campaign, focused around our upcoming anniversary for 10 years of Nottingham being a City of Literature. In this campaign I chose to highlight various literary locations around Nottingham, building my understanding of the literary history of the city. I also created some posts looking back on some of our previous projects we have run over the last 10 years, celebrating our successes. This was a task I really enjoyed, specifically due to the amount of creative freedom I was given for it, which was an overarching theme throughout my internship.
As an example, towards the start of my internship I was asked to create some content around what we affectionately refer to as our ‘birthday book bus’. This is a bus that travels around various routes in Nottingham, with a poster highlighting that this year is our 10 year anniversary of being named a City of Literature. The brief I was given was fairly open, and this is definitely something I ran with, making a series of videos centred around the bus; from breaking down what we’ve been up to over the last ten years whilst on the bus, to using it to travel to a variety of literary locations around Nottingham. This campaign really pushed me creatively, challenging me to think outside the box and really focus on targeting our content to our intended audience.
Aside from social media content, my role also involved working on other types of communication, like our monthly newsletter and various blog posts, such as this one. These are areas that I had little experience in, so getting to work on them was really valuable. Specifically, I gained experience working with the software that we use for publishing the newsletter and website. This is something that I definitely would not have had the opportunity to do without this internship, and yet are skills that are definitely going to be incredibly useful as I move forward in my career, so I really valued learning them.
Reflection
As I reach the end of my internship, I can confidently say that it has been an amazing experience all round. I have been given countless opportunities to develop skills that are going to greatly benefit me in workplaces in the future, and have been provided incredibly useful guidance that aided me in developing those skills. I started this internship already having a relatively strong idea of my future career aspirations, but it has been through this internship that I developed many of the abilities that I will require as I continue towards my career goal.
Throughout my internship I have felt incredibly valued and appreciated by the City of Literature team, which has played a key role in my enjoyment of my internship. The entire team are so warm and welcoming, and really foster an environment where interns can thrive. I am so grateful to everyone who has helped me make this experience such a good one, and I am so excited to see all the amazing things Nottingham City of Literature continues to do!