Bloomsburg Public Library Internship Week 4

My fourth week as an Emergent Media intern in the Marketing Department of the Bloomsburg Public Library was focused a lot on preparing for the 3rd annual Murder Mystery event with a mixture of creative work and problem solving. It was nice to finally feel like there was some sort of goal and I was contributing to something. 

Monday, I learned more about how nonprofits fundraise and also did a little inventory. First, I was introduced to the organization Candid which is a nonprofit database that helps organizations maintain public profiles with information about their mission, programs and finances. Funders and donors often use it or websites like it to research nonprofits so keeping information updated and accurate is really important for transparency and credibility. However, the purposes I needed it for were finding EIN numbers for the partner libraries that were also going to be benefiting from the Murder Mystery event. EIN is an acronym for Employee Identification Number and it's essentially a business' social security number. I had to find the EIN's for the Orangeville Public Library (23-3075659), being extra careful not to accidentally get the Orange Country Public Library number, and the Friends of the Columbia Country Traveling Library (23-2662846). The reason I had to find these is because they were needed for sending gift card requests to Weis Markets and Giant Food Stores which we we needed to help offset the cost of buying ingredients and beverages for the event. I didn't send these myself but I watched my supervisor do it.

One of my bigger, longer projects was creating a list of needs for Facebook events. When I looked into it, I realized we were incredibly behind; the only things on the Facebook were the Murder Mystery days and the once-a-month Lego program which isn't even called Lego Night anymore (it is now Builder Buddies)! This was incredibly overwhelming at first when I realized there are 19 weekly or bi-weekly events and 17 monthly or bi-monthly events, not even counting the random one-off events like the Sarah Van Tassel talk in May. But I created a list/graph, separated into weekly, monthly, and random events, of things that needed to be added. The best part is they are actually using my list to catch-up.

I also helped prepare for the actual execution of the Murder Mystery event by helping find prizes and inventorying. We found some cool literary pens to give to the big winners and some fun literary-themed bookmarks in fun shapes for the runner-ups. On top of that, I helped inventory the amount of raffle tickers and paper goods we had. These were a good reminder that events don't magically happen, they take a lot of work and organization.

On Wednesday, I learned about PDF2Go and how it's used. I also helped write a caption for the Murder Mystery promo video which featured a gloved hand flipping through a book titled "Murder One: A Writers Guide to Homicide," in the caption we invited people to put on their best Sherlock impressions and solve the murder. This was fun because it tapped into my major a little bit, which is Creative Writing.

I'm mostly learning about new websites I had never heard of, but I am also learning that even the smallest tasks contribute to something much larger.

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