My Projects at AGS

I played a major role in 3 projects with Antrim Grace Solutions, two minor/mid-sized projects, and one large project. The smallest of my projects was an election tracker I co-created with another intern. The tracker was created on a spreadsheet and was used for the Virginia General Assemblies delegates and senators. The tracker showed who the incumbent was, how long they’ve served, what district they serve, the voting pattern of the district, the results and competitor of the previous election, and the money raised and spent for each competitor in the previous election. I really enjoyed working on this project because Heidi (our supervisor) just gave us an example of a previous tracker she had used and then gave us free rein. Even though there wasn’t a lot of flexibility with the project it was nice to do it with just my partner and not be micromanaged.

I also spent some time working on some marketing/outreach efforts for a platform called “Democratyzed” with another intern. “Democratyzed” is a social platform that allows legislators in Virginia to post more policy-based content and allow citizens to follow bills throughout the general assembly. My fellow intern and I worked on a plan to reach out to political groups, school districts, and universities across the state of Virginia and created a personalized email pitch to get them to sign up for the platform. We also researched contact information for all the legislative aides and staff for each delegate and senator and entered it into the election tracker database to reach out to all of them and offer demos.

Finally, the project that took the most time and effort was my “Future of Virginia” report that I was writing for one of our clients, VOW (Virginia our Way). This report was an extensive list of legislative recommendations with background research in five major policy issues. These issues were economy, voting, energy and environment, education, and health care. I would write about one section a week and then confer with AGS’s associate (Saunders) to go over revisions and recommendations. The end product ended up being a twenty-five-page report with an executive summary outlining different bills that should be passed and drafted to address issues in each of the policy areas. This was the most fulfilling work I did this summer as I was fully in control of the report and wrote the entire thing, with extensive amounts of research and evidence to support the findings and recommendations.