Sophie's Communications and Marketing Internship with Liftshare -- halfway point

I began my internship at liftshare on the 20th August 2012 and am due to finish my 12 week period on the 9th November 2012, so I’m just over half-way in at the moment. I was attracted to the position within liftshare (a car-sharing company based in Attleborough) because it would involve me learning skills I have never thought about before, and experiencing a variety of different tasks over the 3 months.

Already I have contacted over 30 large environmental organisations including WWF Earth Hour, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Freeconomy, Freecycle and Do the Green Thing in my capacity as Marketing and Communications Intern at liftshare. I have written copy for articles to be sent to these ‘big names’ and tweets and Facebook content too. I have developed friendly relationships with many of them too. In addition I have composed guest blogs for a number of websites which have been published and helped with a press release. Within the company I am also writing blogs for our own site liftshare.com which the public will be able to view. The topics are varied and the length of each one varies too!

Within the first week I was inundated with meetings at the company (which is a small collective of around 20 staff) and I took many notes. I am currently organising the work social for liftshare Week which is 1st-5th October and the big publicity event that I have been helping the Communications and PR manager with for the majority of my time there. I am hoping everybody enjoys it!

Last week I applied for the PEA Business Awards and nominated liftshare under the two categories of ‘Social Enterprise’ and ‘Transport’. I am also currently working on two statistics based projects, one of which is almost complete and the other, a work in progress! I am managing the re-design of a series of monitoring pages on the liftshare website so that customers with car-share schemes can view their financial and environmental savings more easily. To do this I am liaising with the IT department on how best to approach the technical side of things!

Finally, I am keeping an eye on our liftshare Week targets and issuing certificates which I helped design (alongside IT) to those scheme managers who do particularly well in signing employees up to car-sharing in the first week of October.

It has been very intense so far, with not much time to stop really! I work an 8 ½ hour day on a 9-5.30pm shift, Monday to Thursday and commute the 20 or so miles to Attleborough each day (rather ironically I don’t have a car). It is very tiring, but it is totally new and I think I am doing quite well so far...