My key learning experiences to date - So what am I up to?

So what have been my key learning experiences and significant incidents to date? 

• I began my placement for South Ribble School Sport Partnership back in late November 2014 and now were currently at the start of February 2015, so I'v been working with the partnership over the course of 3 months for one day a week (Tuesdays), and I'm doing 4-8 hours on a Tuesday (depending on how many events taking place) and then 3 hours personal time for social media, website development and press related tasks throughout the week for them too. I consider myself to now have settled into my role well. I have formed good working relationships with each of my team mates (image - left) and they are a great and highly motivated team to carry out my placement for. At first it took me a few weeks to break into my role and understand exactly what the partnership team aims to achieve and understand all my upcoming duties, but now i'm settled and enjoying my experience to date. I've also recently agreed with the company to carry on doing my placement up until July time when the primary schools break up for summer, to gain more industry experience and keep on learning.
• My first experience with them was understanding what the school sports partnership company aims to achieve and how I will help them achieve their goals. I attended regular team meetings with the cohort of our team and discussed the academic year ahead and our plans for the school year. We outlined the calendar of school sports events, and what the team members roles were going to be throughout the calendar. For me, I have a few main aims, and currently (February 2015) my tasks are still upcoming and new ones keep arising, as I've recently agreed to help out with marketing for the School Games Lancashire finals in June 2015. I will talk about my upcoming duties for my extended placement more in my upcoming posts!
• Currently, one of my aims for example is being responsible for managing the social media page for the company (Twitter). I ensure that tweets before and after the event are tweeted to our target markets (primary schools, teachers and governing bodies) to ensure everyone knows our latest news and events. In addition to social media, I'm responsible for the development on the partnerships website page. When I started my placement the partnership had already established a website, however it wasn't search engine optimized and therefore no-one could find and access our website. In addition, the features on the platform were outdated and little creativity and innovation could be conveyed across the webpage. Therefore I created a task for myself to create a new website for the partnership this coming year. Its still under construction and will be published within the next couple of weeks. The new website will aim to publicize all of our primary school sports events, and include, videos, photos, text and interactive technology to really engage with our target markets. This is an ongoing task for me and will carry on the website until the foreseeable future. Come back to my blog soon to see the new website in action and experience the new features instilled!
• The website and social media sites link into another duties of mine, which is attending all the primary school sports events which the partnership team hold. Each Tuesday morning and sometimes afternoon events too, I will attend the events and take official photographs for the partnership and use these photos to publish on our new website and social media sites. However, a constraint and incidence to consider is data protection when taking photographs of the participants. I therefore need to ask all the school teaches whether any participant isn't allowed their photos taken, and therefore this can be a timely and strategic process in each event when taking photographs. In addition to taking photos, I help run the event and help set up and tidy away equipment, and collect team sheets from teachers during the events, and I also obtain feedback from all the schools. For the feedback part, I'll ask each school their thoughts on the event, such as what they enjoyed, and future improvement, which allow the partnership to see how we can improve our events (customer research).

In addition to the maintenance of our social media page, and creation of our new website, I lease with the 'Lancashire Evening Post' and are linked with the sports editor for the LEP. Each week I create a Press Release to email to the LEP and promote our upcoming events. We recently held the Sports Hall Athletics School Games South Ribble Borough Final (20th January) and this is set to be published in the local Lancashire paper soon! This duty of ensuring that press releases are sent and promoting our events to the press is something I'm enjoying and an essential communication strategy for our company.

So these are my main duties at the present time. I'm very busy and enjoying the experience so far. Were only half way through the academic primary schools calendar, and now that I'm settled into my role, the roles and responsibilities are going be become more frequent and a lot more exciting times ahead. It's early days in my mind, and a lot more experiences to be gained! 

In my upcoming blog I'll be talking more about my thoughts on my placement experiences so far, and referring back to my initial aims for development as well.