Impact Report: Spotlight on Internships

I started my internship with CMP the day before this year’s lockdown in January started. Luckily for me by then CMP had adjusted well to working through lockdowns, and I actually found it much easier to adapt to working remotely than I’d thought I would. One of the reasons for this is that there are daily meetings you can choose to drop into, and I found this great for getting to know the team at CMP and creating a sense of community, rather than it just being me and the screen. There is also a weekly Fun Palaces session, a virtual meeting where people do arts and craft, which I’ve really enjoyed, it’s been great for keeping up with hobbies while taking a bit of a mid-week break. I’ve also been using applications like Slack, Microsoft Planner, SharePoint, and Trello, to organise work and send messages about questions or comments that don’t quite merit an email. It took a while to get used to these applications at first, but now I find them really useful and I think they will be beneficial skills for the future.  

I’ve been working at CMP as a Digital Marketing Intern, primarily for the wAVE project, or Coastal Timetripping which is the project’s public facing name. In short, this project is aimed at developing experiences that use immersive technology (like augmented and virtual reality) in museums. A good example would be the Bude virtual reality experience which recently launched, that uses virtual reality to simulate the experience of guiding an old merchant ship into Bude’s canal. It’s a really exciting project that has been great fun to work on, I’ve certainly learned a lot more about this type of technology than I knew before joining the project. It’s also given me the chance to be very creative and to develop my own ideas and strategies for marketing the project. My main roles are the social media, website and blogs, and the bi-weekly newsletter. There’s a lot of freedom in what I choose to create, and it’s been really interesting to experiment a bit and then refine based on the analytics of the different platforms.  

There’s also been a lot of opportunities for personal development, including various online webinars and training courses. Most recently I’ve done a training course with CMP on how to deal with online abuse, and how to set up a support structure in advance of anything happening. It was a very helpful and thorough course, and I know that what I learned from it will be useful no matter where I go on to work. Through CMP’s membership with the Arts Marketing Association I’ve also developed a lot of my skills in the marketing sector. In addition, there are monthly team sharing sessions, where different members of the team will do a short presentation on useful applications they’ve found, projects within the company, and general skills and knowledge. For instance, I’ve seen sessions on Microsoft forms, pension schemes, and CMP’s social media analytics. This has been a great chance to learn more in general, but also about what is happening in CMP and what the rest of the team have been doing.  

I’ve gained a lot from my time working for CMP, in particular I’ve really developed my ability to be enterprising, to independently manage projects and make decisions as well as take risks in this regard. In addition, I’ve improved my knowledge of marketing as well as the heritage sector in general, and I feel confident in my ability to find opportunities in both these areas in the future.

 

-Magali Guastalegnanne, CMP Digital Marketing Intern