I have now completed my one-month internship with Anthony Nolan. For those of you who haven’t read my previous blog posts, Anthony Nolan is a charity that saves the lives of people with blood cancers or blood disorders. They match patients in need of a bone marrow transplants to selfless donors who have signed up to their register.
The internship was not quite what I had expected. This was in part because my original project goals changed. Initially my project was to create and share digital content that would encourage young men to sign up to the register. My first week went to plan and I studied research into how young men interact online but after that instead of creating new content I worked on promoting a piece of content called Donny and the Professor Cure Blood Cancer that tells the story of how a bone transplant works in a comic book themed story (and it’s a lot better than anything I could have done). The whole series can be found at www.anthonynolan.org/Donny.
I also used the time to develop a spreadsheet of patient appeals from the past two years using Facebook to find the reach of each post and how much it was interacted with in terms of reactions or shares. This can be used by Anthony Nolan to determine which kind of appeal is most successful when they create future content.
So although my project didn’t go exactly to plan it was not half as scary as I expected it to be. The experience was very fulfilling and enjoyable.
During my internship I learnt the importance of teamwork both within one division and between divisions and how vital communication between teams is so the experience has taught me a lot about how to interact in a work environment. It was also so useful to gain an insight into what working for a charity entails and especially great to do it in a charity I care so much about.
I also very much enjoyed working with the Engagement team, they were all kind, considerate and helpful from my first day until my last and I just want to Thank them and everybody else that I worked with during my time at Anthony Nolan for making the experience so good.
I look forward to the year ahead, working with the Marrow team to run fundraising and recruitment events within Imperial.