My Jezuba Experience

What I learned from working at Jezuba
 
When I started working at Jezuba in June, I was excited, but extremely uncertain. I didn’t know what my role would mean, what kind of people I would be working with, or what my end goal would be. All I knew was that I liked Jezuba’s goal and wanted to give back. During my first day, I logged into our newly approved Global Giving Campaign page to upload some content only to mistakenly find out that there were only nine days left in the June campaign. I panicked thinking I had barely more than a week to design, build, and execute a fundraising strategy. That day, I finished creating our Global Giving project and emailed Rebecca, both for final approval and to ask here if this was physically possible to do. That was when I found out that our campaign was to take place during the September Accelerator program, going from September 14 - 30th, not the June program. This meant that I had a lot more time to plan. Setting up the page was already done. What was I to do now?

Finding My Own Direction and being Comfortable with Creativity
 
After I completed the Global Giving Campaign, I wasn’t sure what to do next. I was encouraged to pick a project that both meant something to me and was achievable within my 8 weeks of working here. However, feeling a bit lost and without a clear structure, I struggled with what that could be. I spent my days researching different non-profits and looking at different methods of fundraising but at the end of every day, I felt like I hadn’t accomplished much else. This all changed when I realized that the Global Giving Campaign wasn’t quite finished. Sure - there were pictures and text on the page, but there wasn’t really anything present to set it apart from the rest of the projects on the site. As I was looking over other non-profit projects on the June Accelerator leaderboard, I saw that there wasn’t much differentiation among the most successful to least successful campaigns.  Whatever was working was taking place off the site. I would have to figure out how to bring people to the Global Giving campaign. 
 
This became my starting place. What would be engaging on social media? What would be informational, fun, and had a low barrier of entry? What would you actually engage with on your phone during your 20 min lunch break? The Global Giving campaign is just over to two weeks long. It isn’t a lot of time to raise the money that we need. Jezuba really needed to be prepared in advance for what actions it would take during this time. This is where I came up with the idea of daily video uploads. These would be fun, short, and interesting videos that would allow a person to learn more about our Global Giving campaign, specifically, and Jezuba’s importance as a whole. I hoped, through these short videos, people could learn something new. Listening to a paragraph is easier than reading one. I compiled a list of topics that I thought would be interesting and highlighted different aspects of Jezuba; ranging from featuring our artists to how solar panels work. From there I just needed to figure out how to make them. 
 
I knew I needed to collaborate with other people and become more familiar with video editing software. I have previous experience with such software from working on several class projects, but nothing to this extent. However, after some practice and patience, things got easier and faster. I was able to pull in other members of the team to make some of the videos in order to express their experiences in their own words. Initially, I was uncomfortable being in front of the camera and creating something that other people would see. Realizing that this would be something that I would be wholly in charge of, I wondered if my ideas would be good enough. Asking for feedback and help along the way was key to creating something that I was comfortable with and proud of. I also tried to minimize what worried me. Instead of being in front of the camera, I elected to do voice overs. Overall, I’m really happy with how the videos turned out. Several of them can also be used outside of the Global Giving campaign and can be used all overJezuba’s website. I hope that my work this summer will continue to support Jezuba even after my internship concludes. 
 
Jillian Murphy
Solar LED Program Manager