Hello everyone! Today is the last day of my Arts Management Internship here at Encore. It’s been an amazing summer and I want to share some of the highlights and tell you all about what life as an intern has been like.
I was put to work right away for our 50th Anniversary Celebration and our big season reveal back in June (for those of you who were there, I made the season reveal book!) and I’ve been hard at work ever since. I helped with our website update, particularly the Opportunities, 2018/2019 Season, Staff, and Past Seasons pages, school outreach, taking photos of our camps and Seussical, and many design projects you’ll see later in the season! I also helped out at camps by greeting at Stage Door and Scenes for Tweens and creating all the programs for the camp shows.
One of my favorite projects that I got to work on was designing posters for some of our upcoming events. You’ve already seen the Costume Caper 5K poster at Seussical, but be on the lookout for our Early Childhood Classes and Disney’s Newsies posters in the coming months! I love design and I really enjoyed the opportunity to create these posters as well as some website pages, social media graphics, and the shirts for the upcoming Improv-A-Thon and Summer Nights Live camps.
But, by far, my favorite experience of the summer was being Front of House Manager for Seussical. While I’m a huge theatre fan, I’ve never been a part of a show before and I had no idea what to expect. I had so much fun running around and making sure everything went smoothly. This experience showed me what a great community Encore and theatre are and I was really sad when it was all over I have to give a big thank you to my wonderful Front of House Crew for making working Seussical so much fun and so fulfilling!
I learned a lot this summer about theatre. As I said, I came in with no theatre experience, so I had no idea what goes on behind the scenes. Well let me tell you, there’s A LOT, and I don’t just mean backstage! So much preparation goes into setting up, advertising, creating the Playbill, social media, building the website so that people can actually buy tickets, answering patron questions, and so much more! It was awesome to learn about this largely unseen part of theatre.
As a marketing major, I’m very interested in learning about how theatres like Encore promote their shows and classes. Aileen (Encore’s Marketing Director and my supervisor) taught me about all the marketing avenues Encore uses to do so. She really broadened my understanding of how far the term marketing reaches and how a nonprofit like Encore manages its resources.
This means that I learned a lot about the inner workings of nonprofits too. Being a nonprofit comes with it’s own challenges and opportunities and it was fascinating to learn about and see how Encore takes charge of them.
I think being a non-profit is what makes the Encore culture so awesome. Everyone loves coming in to work and is always ready to share their passion. I’ve felt welcome here since day one and I’ve never learned names so quickly. This summer has been hectic for everyone but no one let it affect the positive atmosphere of the office. I too enjoyed coming in to the office every morning, coffee in hand, ready to take on the day.
I’m going to leave you all with some of the photos I took these past 8 weeks and a final thank you to Aileen and the Encore team for making this summer so memorable! To anyone considering this internship in the future, definitely apply! If you love theatre, this is a great opportunityand I’m very glad I got to have this experience.
