Mortal Fools' Intern Maya Spencer-Jacobs shares her experience working with Mortal Fools over the last 10 weeks

About Me

Hello! I’m Maya, an Economics undergraduate from Hertfordshire, studying at the University of Leeds. I am a huge sushi fan and during lockdown I started running again! Before the pandemic and over the last year, I was President of Leeds Women in Leadership society which had an extremely successful year, securing five corporate sponsors and winning 3 society awards.  This year I had plans to study in Sydney, Australia but I am studying remotely for now, so when I saw Mortal Fool’s summer internship – I thought it was a great, new opportunity.

I applied for the internship because I am really keen to gain an insight into the business and strategic side of the creative and arts sector and wanted to find out more about how companies were faring during such a difficult time. Having researched Mortal Fools, I knew they had continued to run virtual sessions innovatively and interactively online to keep members engaged. From the internship, I was keen to also be able to adapt to a remote working environment and improve my time management skills alongside my studies. In particular, I was interested to learn how to migrate data from legacy systems to build and populate a bespoke customer relationship system.

The Team

Starting a new role is always daunting, especially remotely; new people and new projects. Opening the greeting card which the Mortal Fool’s team posted to me on my first day, I realised there wasn’t really time to be nervous. My day starts earlier than most, as I am completing my exchange program with the University of Sydney remotely from the UK. By our 9am team meetings, I have already been up for 4 hours and am probably thinking about my second meal. The core team understand and value the importance in replicating the pre-meeting norms we were used to prior to lockdown. The low buzz chatter whilst making coffee with our colleagues in the staff room. A ritual which could easily be forgotten in virtual meetings, the core team ensure team check ins are number one on the agenda. We reflect on our personal struggles of the past week and if lockdown is impacting our mental health, before getting down to the nitty gritty. 

My Role

​It goes without saying the arts and entertainment industry is one of many industries which has greatly suffered over the past few months, and there is great uncertainty to when in-person sessions and performances with live audiences will be allowed to resume. However, what is certain, is that the Mortal Fools team having quickly adapted to using digital platforms and spaces and have planned ahead. Their next 6 months are sure to be action packed, fostering digital project after the next. As a summer intern, I’ve been working closely with the core team across multiple projects from seeking sponsorship to developing future business strategy. One of my intern tasks so far, has been to develop Mortal Fool’s existing audience focusedapproach, and take the reins with implementing a CRM (customer relationship management) system. This will allow the team to streamline their communication channels with individuals and stakeholders in the business and free up their time to focus on more creative tasks. While university modules can only take you so far in the theory of integrating such a system into a business, working practically with Mortal Fool’s diverse datasets has been insightful to put my database knowledge to the test. 
 
Also, I’ve been involved with Mortal Fool’s business outreach strategy. We’re keen to spread the word about Mortal Fool’s activities and increase our engagement, therefore an important part to this has been monitoring our digital presence, including our website and LinkedIn to ensure that our projects are fully accessible. We’re keen to champion and share Mortal Fool’s work over the last year, and so I’ve also been creating advocacy booklets and reports to showcase the team’s hard work. We aim to use these resources to evidence why Mortal Fool’s is strongly placed within the creative sector to attract investment to continue to support our activities.

​What have I learnt?

1. There’s no such thing as free publicity. Asking both local and national news and publishing outlets to showcase your success or work often comes at a high price.
2. Building client relationships can take up to two years. Having mapped the consumer journey in a series of flowcharts, illustrating the initial lead in, to potentially securing them as a client by the end – there are many factors and potential risks which need to be mitigated to keep the relationship on track.
3. How valuable charity time is. For example, writing a grant application can use lots of the team’s resources and capacity, therefore an unsuccessful bid is a week worth of hours which could have been channelled towards a more charitable task.

​My favourite activity this week, has been initialising a template for the team to use for youth theatre projects. The template acts as a base to create registers and attendance list and populate with all the required data when the participating names are entered. This required lots of excel formulas, including VLOOKUP, match cases, lots of IF statements and referencing the user’s unique keys from the master file which I have filtered.  
 
I am looking forward to seeing what the last few weeks at Mortal Fool’s brings!

By Maya Spencer-Jacobs