Hello there, my name is Lorinde! I recently graduated and for the past two months, I’ve been working at Twipe. I joined Twipe’s Business Development team as an intern working on the Digital Growth Summit.
When I joined the team in mid-August, the foundations for DGS were laid – date, location, main speakers were booked. Now the real job was about to start: getting people to register, communicate, organize, think through and prepare each and every second of the event to be sure to not miss out on anything! My internship purely focused on DGS but I have never before been working on such a wide variety of tasks:
- Direct contact with guests – This implied a lot of emails, Linkedin messages, and calls. It was intense and required perseverance, but at the same time it was rewarding each time a new registration came in. The task also allowed me to get acquainted with common tools such as Mailchimp and the CRM software Zoho.
- Creative projects – I created a digital magazine and prepared a somewhat artsy introduction video for the Summit. Seeing the video being showcased in front of all those important people the day-of was a powerful moment.
- Social media management – Learning the basics of Twitter and other social media tools to optimize our communication was very valuable. I really learned that small things can make a huge difference.
- Planning and brainstorming – A lot of the work for DGS was done together with the team, alternating thorough planning sessions to go through every stage of the day to ensure a smooth process, with brainstorming and creative sessions for coming up with cool ideas to build the DGS experience.
- Practical work/hands on – As the big day was approaching, there was of course practical work involved: packing, ordering taxis, sending out surprise mail for registered guests, preparing the event badges…every detail is necessary. This was a fun alternative to my other work.
- Research – Working with Mary-Katharine, Twipe’s Media Innovation Analyst, I also had the chance to get an insight into the industry research conducted at Twipe and contributed by summarizing reports or helping her edit the blog articles.
On top of the above, I followed along with the everyday tasks of the business development team and got a basic understanding of the sales pipeline. Being able to get in touch with so many different parts of the business is definitely a strength of a company such as Twipe. You are encouraged to actively take part in conversations and invited to contribute wherever you can. With this wide variety of tasks, my internship was of course highly instructive, but another essential ingredient to this was the responsibility and trust I was given in completing the tasks.
The day of the summit, I had a great time meeting professionals from different parts of the news publishing industry and listening to inspiring sessions by thought-leaders on innovation and transformation. The publishing industry definitely is going through a very interesting phase: news is becoming increasingly digital, a new kind of competition is arising and reader behaviors have to be addressed to sustain profitable and quality news.
If there would be three company aspects to highlight which I especially appreciated during my Twipe experience these would be the teamwork, the agile environment and the goal-oriented and celebration culture.
