Intern: Claire Farrington Week 13

Purpose: Where did you start and how are you finishing? Give me a story of what you learned,
how you know, and what evidence you have that tells me you got better and developed your
skills. Use your artifacts to help tell your story. I don't want to read an epic story, at the same
time, it's important to go back through your reflections to put together a coherent narrative.

One of the biggest things I learned this semester was how to effectively communicate
my ideas to a public audience using social media and other digital platforms. Before this
internship, I rarely shared my work with more than one individual at a time. However, since
starting at Women4Change, I have been challenged to create work that I know will be
accessible to the public. At first, I was very uncomfortable with this thought and it made me
feel self-conscious about the work I created. With time and practice, I became more confident
in my abilities and developed specific skills that I will continue to use once my internship has
finished.
Specifically, for Black History Month I was asked to write four blog posts featuring and
highlighting Black Women Suffragists. Initially, I was quite nervous about this. I had never
written a blog post or something that would be as publicly accessible as it would be. However, I
found that writing a blog post was similar to writing an assignment in that it was important to
do some preliminary research first and use a similar introduction, middle, and conclusion
structure. I found it effective to also include notable statistics or quotes from individuals, in an
attempt to make these posts more relatable. Once I submitted the first one to the Vice
President of Communications, I received positive feedback about my writing, which
subsequently made me more confident when writing the next three.
A couple of weeks later, I was asked to create some infographics and social media
content to be shared on our social media platforms. This required me to utilize Canva which I
had not spent much time using prior. I found it fun to play around with and explore this tool.
The first post I created was a post to raise awareness about the Black Maternal Health Crisis. At
the time, I was quite proud of my work as I thought it successfully utilized our brand colors and
conveyed appropriate information. However, looking back I feel as though this post, while
informative, is quite boring. It has no texture and is not very engaging.

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 After this, I got the opportunity to continue using Canva to create various civic
education resources including posts about “What to Expect on Election Day”, “Early Voting
Locations”, “College Student Voting”, “Becoming a Poll Worker”, and
“The Indiana Civics Bee”. While creating these posts I started to get a
little bit more familiar with Canva and began using more creativity in my
designs. I stopped worrying as much about sticking strictly to
Women4Change colors. I also tried to keep in mind the information I
was conveying and tried to design my posts with sensitivity to the
audience that would see it. This involved using simple designs to ensure
viewers did not get lost in our posts, and short sentences or segments
of texts to maintain engagement.
This brings me to my most recent social media post about Sexual Assault Awareness
Month (SAAM). This post was intended to inform our followers that it was SAAM and to share
with them some information regarding the state of sexual assault in Indiana. This was essential
and potentially sensitive information to convey. I felt that this was my best effort at balancing
brand colors and styles. Conveniently the bow for SAAM is the same color as our
Women4Change teal, which helped with color consistency. I enjoyed making and using new
graphics to convey information visually alongside the text. Having both these mediums helps
present information in more than one way, potentially catering to various learning styles
concurrently. Although this post is yet to be published, I am excited to see how people engage
with it and the feedback I get.

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 Overall, this semester I have made a lot of progress in developing my communication on
digital platforms. I have learned to embrace not knowing how to do things and the
uncomfortableness of being a beginner and learning new specific skills. In the future, I would
love to take a class about legal or general guides for creating social media posts. For example, I
would love to learn more about issues of copyright to ensure that I am always crediting the
right people when presenting their information in my social media posts.