Reflection #3 My Personal Contributions at the American Cancer Society

For this blog post about my contributions to my internship site, I will address some of the specific ways that I have contributed to particular projects and efforts, and perspectives that I have shared that have changed and enhanced projects and efforts. I am interning with the American Cancer Society (ACS). Within the ACS, I am working with the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network (ACS CAN). This subset of the American Cancer Society works on government relations and lobbying, communications and advocacy, and volunteer recruitment and engagement. 

In my internship I am interning specifically under the digital communications team. This team is made up of four people, each with specific roles that fall under digital communications, government relations, and engagement of volunteers. One of the ways that I have contributed the most to my team is being able to work on/ catch up on projects that they have fallen behind on or have not been able to get to because of other things that have come up more urgently. In the year before my internship started, the American Cancer Society underwent a large internal structural change. Prior to this change, the digital communications team was five people, but due to the restructure, one of them was fired. It has been stressed to my team that as a result of this, a lot of projects have been forced to be pushed aside. Some of the specific projects that I have worked on in order to help with this have been, writing articles on our legislative campaigns for our website, tracking engagement of our social media posts and emails, and analyzing google analytics of visitors to the website. Other projects that I have worked on that are not so much things my team has fell behind on, but instead other projects that help our efforts regarding our current campaigns are, writing petitions for our volunteers and supporters to sign urging congress to take a certain action, creating social media advertisements and posts in order to spread awareness of certain issues and get engagement on our action items, and creating presentations to give information and analysis to my team on the status of certain projects. This work not only contributes to the current action of my team, it also contributes to our overall goals of increasing access to healthcare for cancer patients and survivors, reducing health disparities, increasing funding for cancer research, and helping to end suffering and death from cancer. 

Secondly, I have also contributed to the team by adding a different perspective. My team works with our volunteers in a large national sense. Because of this, we look at the larger picture of our volunteer structure. One of the ways that my perspective has contributed to this team has been through helping to engage younger and more diverse volunteers into our organization. I have been able to understand where some of our campaigns may be missing a younger and more diverse audience, and I have helped correct some of the language of our informational materials to engage a different audience. I have also helped contribute to a project that is transcreatoring our websites, social media posts, and materials into Spanish. I was able to add my perspective and experiences to conversations when we were deciding which organization to contract for the project after going through RFP’s and vendor proposals, as well as what materials to focus on and the tone. I have been happy to provide a different perspective to these projects and it has been rewarding to have the adults I am working with truly interested in my perspective and actually taking my opinions and advice on certain things.