Follow up is everything

If its one thing that I have found to be a huge focus and to be very important to organisation success during the first half of my internship - it's follow up.

Everyone in the office spends a lot of time following up after initial contacts and agreements to ensure that everyone is on track and on the same page towards an event. It has to be timely and polite to ensure that it comes across in the correct way - that you are working towards mutual benefit.

This includes - Analysing feedback and improving processes, but also providing statistics that are used to gain sponsors. Thanking speakers. Thanking attendees. Potential member details. Networking contacts and connecting attendees through mediums such as LinkedIn. Membership packs. Following up emails with calls for personal responses. Updating databases of active contacts. Review of the event and adjustments for future events.

The follow up is key to the delivery of future events, by maintaining and building relationships.

The other thing I was able to do this month is to write for the newsletter. I had to read past newsletters to pick up the style and feel of the writing before being able to write my particular section. It was challenging to not be able to simply sit and write however I would normally do it, but instead I had to think about the audience and the newsletter as a whole to set the right tone and match my language. I really enjoyed this task, as well as writing speaker biographies for upcoming events for the website. It was very rewarding to know that my efforts were going to good use and being read by people. It was also a different kind of challenge to focus on the writing style and content that is required by the newsletter, rather than just how I would normally write an article.

Hope everything is going well for everyone.

Tonya.