After gaining a better understanding of the operations and facility management side of sports, I wanted to take a look at a more creative side of the industry. During the fall of 2014, I began an internship with the Department of Fitness and Recreation over departmental marketing and communication efforts. This internship was unique, because it was the same department I was completing my graduate assistantship with so I was already familiar with the procedures in place and recognized areas for improvement, however, also because it gave me the ability to directly supervise four undergraduate students.
Prior to this semester, the Assistant Director of Fitness and Recreation oversaw the departmental marketing efforts. However, during the summer of 2014 the director was promoted to assistant dean of students in the Division of Student Affairs and subsequently the assistant director was promoted to director. I recognized this as a great opportunity to fully immerse myself in marketing and communications, knowing that the responsibilities of the new director would need to be dispersed. We came up with a plan for how the departmental marketing efforts would run and the procedures for having work completed by the graphic designers and having the work approved. We also discussed a plan for how we would disperse the information to the campus, whether by the MyBelmont home page utilized by the students, faculty and staff, the department’s social media pages, tabling to get in front of the students, or posters hung around campus. We decided to employ a strategy based on the event or information that we were promoting or displaying.
At the beginning of the semester, I sat down with the marketing student team and came up with a plan for the semester and then we set group goals as well as individual goals. Quarterly we reviewed these goals, talked about what went well and what we could improve upon for next time and I think this made us more effective as a team.
We encountered some challenges for discovering the best form of communication for reaching out to the campus community. We commonly utilize our Facebook page which automatically posts to our Instagram, however, we realized that students may see that information in passing, it doesn’t necessarily provide a concrete place for them to find information. We do have a website that we use to post information, but that’s not good for quick updates if something is cancelled last minute. With tabling, we had a program assistant that ran all of our marketing table efforts and we began to coordinate with the dorms to get in front of the students, however, we ended up not being able to go into the dorms. We also commonly used our Belmont homepage for students and staff to give updates and near the end of the year were not able to utilize the calendar if we were already using the announcements. It became trial and error to see which resource members of the community were using more often. Overall, aside from all of our challenges I believe that we had a very successful year and saw record numbers in Intramural programming, group fitness classes and facility usage. We were also able to market and promote some new events that the department put on which was exciting as a team.
Overseeing three graphic designers was a unique experience since I do not have graphic design experience myself, however, I learned that management is about managing people and relationships and it is not necessary to know how to do what it is they are working on. Having the larger vision and goal is what a good leader needs to stay on top of things. There were some challenges with the program assistant along the way and being unhappy in her position but we were able to create some new tasks and in turn, meaning for her position. At the end of the semester, I completed employee performance evaluations with them and discussed ways they could improve the following semester as well as what I could be doing better to supervise them. In the process we came up with some great new organizational ideas. I’ve learned a lot about myself as a leader and as a manager working with them.
Along with the management of the designers, I had the opportunity to update the departmental communication guide which outlines our brand, departmental marks, proper usage of communication materials and overall appropriate marketing efforts. In addition to what was already in place, I added material on proper marketing table etiquette and employee expectations as well as departmental mark usage for 125 Years of Belmont which is coming up in the 2015-2016 school year. It has been a great experience to be a part of creating something that will stay around as my legacy in the department.
I believe the experience gained from this marketing and communications internship are transferable into any position whether it is in marketing or not. It is always necessary to know how to manage people and relationships and know how to brand yourself and the work that you do.