15/02/13

It’s my last day at World Challenge! I don’t want to leave! I’ve had such an amazing time and met some wonderful people and I could easily continue working here. I bought a card to thank them all for having me and for helping me have a really great week!

I also found the newsletter that I made for events yesterday on mailchimp: Newslettter for events 🙂

I started laying out the complete newletter because I have 7 features to go in, here they all are: EVERYTHING

Mailchimp is a very awkward website to use for the writing I have done because I’m not used to it and it keeps making everything different sizes and I got quite frustrated by it so I am now uploading my documents to InDesign and editing it there, I think I’m going to produce it as a paper newsletter to show people what I have made and if Matt does want to use it, someone will be able to edit it all for me to send out electronically, I don’t mind what happens with my work because I’ve enjoyed writing everything that I have written and in the process I have met so many inspiring people who have travelled to all these incredible places and everyone seems so passionate about what they do for a living.

Literally all day I was editing everything and making it look presentable, Matt had a look through all of my writing and made notes on it all to give back to me and I found this very helpful! I wrote up the whole newsletter on InDesign, and saved that onto my new World Challenge memory stick! 😉 Matt came to check up on me and let me leave an hour early because I got everything done! They also gave me a free mug… the mug I have been drinking tea out of all week! Haha!

Here is the newsletter: Newsletter_LO

 

 

14/02/13

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! Before I tell you about my day I want to talk to you about what I did last night, me and Clarissa who is the woman I am staying with stayed up writing Valentine’s Day cards for her children and a couple of their friends. She has 2 twin girls who are 9 and a little boy who is 6 and basically we wrote cards for them with cheesy little poems in and signed them with ‘love from ?’ so this morning at around 7:30, Izzy (one of the twins) ran into my room and showed me the card (which I had written) and it was so lovely to see a smile on her face and I found it so funny listening to them try and work out who had sent it! I enjoyed writing the cards too… I wrote this for a 9  year old boy:

‘Harvey Russell, you’re the one for me,
I want you to get down on one knee,
I’ll be with you forever more,
Because you’re the boy I adore,
When you look at me, my heart skips a beat,
Make me yours, sweep me off my feet!’

I find it so adorable writing cards for little children allowing them to guess who wrote it to them, it’s such a nice idea!

Anyhow,

When I arrived at work, I went to my desk and tried to finish the pensions article but I find writing about topics like that incredibly boring so I kept trying to put it off by proof reading my other work. At 10am I was going up to work with the events girls again and as soon as I got up there they told me we were packing bags again. This time was easier because we got into a routine however… We got really into it again, I had packed 90 bags before being told that the cereal bars don’t go in the abseiling bags! So we all had to route through the bags we had packed to take out all the cereal bars, it didn’t take too long though, we packed lots and lots of bags ready for the fundraisers and I’m doing that practically all day today.

But at 1pm we had a Valentine’s Day quiz, I was on a team with the girls from events and we called ourselves #teamyeah! Unfortunately we didn’t win, we scored a measely 19/47, oops! But the man who sits opposite me did win. I find him very funny, we were having a conversation about Valentine’s Day and he told me that he had bought a bottle of perfume his girlfriend asked for off eBay because it was half price but there was no box and someone had used a couple of sprays so he had decided to use the box from her old bottle of the perfume and put a few drops of water in to make it appear full, brilliant! So that quiz was fun, we all gave £1 to take part and that goes to a charity.

I had a meeting at 2pm with a man named Stu Morris who is head of safety and training, you can see my interview with him here: Staff spotlight

For the rest of the afternoon I went back up to events and produced a newsletter promoting their South challengers run, I don’t quite know how to get hold of that yet because I made it on a website called mail chimp but I will try and get it for you to have a look at! Hope you’ve all had a good day and below is a photo of the bag packing 🙂

13/02/13

I arrived at the office at 9:30am and sat at my desk. I started working on the Al Shaheen story I did, and made it a couple of hundred words shorter.

I had an interview with a man named Rod Hicks at 10am who is a new joiner, he works in stores and has many roles in the business including head of logistics, facilities manager and fleet manager. It was interesting to find out a bit about him. I went back to my desk and wrote up that interview, I then gathered up all the information I had on the different parts of the world and started writing up and laying out my ‘news of the world’ piece which I will attatch as a word document below along with the rest of the work I have done today.

At 11am, I had an interview with a woman named Kate Jenkins who is part of the leadership management team, she places expedition leaders on relevant expeditions and manages their administration. She was lovely. I went back to my desk and added that to Rods interview. I then recieved a message off my friend Laura who took part in World Challenge in 2012, so I have completed the spotlight interview with a challenger feature and I will attatch that as well. At 2pm I had an interview with a man called Rob Berry, he is part of the planning team and World Challenge is his first career after graduating from University, he is the planning manager of East Africa and he has travelled to a lot of amazing places so I found his interview interesting. I went back to my desk and filled in his interview answers, so by 2pm today I had completed 3 new features for the newsletter, I now have 5 things to submit!

At 2:45pm I had a meetnig with Matt again, I handed in the work I have completed today along with the updated versions of the Fiji and Al Shaheen features, he said he would have a look and get back to me later on. I then drafted some questions for another spotlight interview with a member of staff named Stu Morris who is important to the health and safety side of the organisation. Matt gave me back the Al Shaheen piece and the News of the world piece with some annotations on them so I corrected them and started writing an article on the new pension schemes. It started snowing really heavily at the end of the day and tomorrow I’m with events again which will be good 🙂

My work from today:  Challenger spotlight printscreen , Spotlight interview with a member of staff draft, New joiner interviews draft , and News from around the world printscreen

12/02/13

Today I started at 9:30am again, I made my way over to my desk and met the woman who is sitting opposite me, her name is Sofia. She took me upstairs and introduced me to the 3 girls who are in charge of events. Their names were Hannah, Karen and Bex and all 3 of them are lovely!

They told me the brief plan of the day and they took me downstairs to the operations centre. They informed me about everything to do with events and that this time of year is the busiest for them. They have many runs and abseiling activities planned over the next few months with various schools and they told me they don’t have a free weekend for a lot of the year now!

They give each challenger a goodie bag at the start of their fundraiser event which contained a t-shirt, a goodie (wallets, water bottles, playing cards, caps etc) and a geo bar. They had 3 different coloured bags: blue, orange and green. And for about 3 hours, we were packing the bags. Small t-shirts in the blue, medium in the green and large in the orange. It was quite stressful because me and one of the girls got chatting a lot and ended up packing large t-shirts in the blue bags so we had to go through them all and sort that out but we had Bruno Mars playing so it was slightly more bearable! We must have packed about 300 bags!

They then took me back up to their desks where Karen and Bex showed me how they sort out the challengers consent forms. I went for my lunch break and when I came back they told me all about the social media they used. They showed me their facebook and twitter page. And let me write two stories for their facebook page! One called ‘challengers of the month’ which was about 2 girls who cycled to school every day to raise money for their expedition and I wrote one about Pancake Day fundraising ideas (see links below) I’m working with them again on Thursday which will be good fun!

http://www.facebook.com/notes/world-challenge-uk-events-fundraising/challenger-of-the-month-february-2013/568335073184370

and

I came back down to my desk at 3:30pm, had a lovely cup of tea and then made my way to Pats office. Pat is the man in charge of the US business, he organises the Boston trips so I found out some information from him about global sites along with information I have on the middle east, south east Asia and South Africa which I will be writing about tomorrow.

I am now editing the stories I wrote yesterday after Matt proof read them and told me I had to cut them down by half!

Tomorrow I have 3 interviews and lots of writing to do! But I’m looking forward to it!

11/02/13

Sorry I have posted this a day late, I had no access to a computer until now! I was starting at World Challenge HQ at 9:30am so I woke up at 7:30 and got myself ready. Clarissa drove me to the office and I went up to meet Niki who is the woman I am shadowing over the next week. She made me a cup of tea and introduced me to a couple members of staff, my initial impressions were that they were all lovely!

Niki showed me where I would be working for the duration of the week and a man in her office is absent therefore I get my own desk which is great! She took me over to Matts office who is the boss of this HQ and he told me that he wanted me to work on a project.

The project is an e-newsletter. As World Challenge is all over the world, he decided an e-newsletter would be most efficient as anyone would have access to it from London to Australia! I took my notebook into the office and jotted down the ideas he had for this e-newsletter which included the following:

• Project Domino which is a web project
• Reservations project which doesn’t have a specific name yet
• Al Shaheen project
• Spotlight interview with a member of staff
• Spotlight interview with a previous challenger
• New joiners interview
• Skype call with someone at the Australian HQ to find out about Global sites
• Embed a video of a teacher speaking
• Talk about new product: Fiji
• Market focus on the US
• New pension laws – how does it affect you? – speak to someone at Human Resources
• Photo of building in the snow, compare with Bostons building

As you can see I have a lot to work on over the week and I am very excited about it! I have already written the story on Fiji, Al Shaheen and I have prepared interview questions for new joiners as I have 3 interviews on Wednesday. One with a member of staff from Stores, one in the Leader Management Team and someone from Plans so I’m looking forward to find out a bit of information about them. I have met lots of amazing people already and have drank my body weight in cups of tea but this is a great placement and I’m looking forward to tomorrow as I am working with the events team!

Here are the documents of the work I have produced today:  Al Shaheen draft Fiji draft Interview questions for new joiners