I was supposed to post 4 times this week but I only posted 3 because I was nervous about what I was supposed to do on the internal communications side of things. There has been turmoil about which third-party scheduling tool to use for posting. As I am Rotary's first intern, I feel pressure to make the best decision for the long-term rotation of the next and the next interns after me. We had been looking at Hootsuite, but when I noticed it was taking a while to get set up, I became hasty and said I'd be happy to look into other options. I ended up making a Rotary profile with Sprout Social, another contender that was highly compared and contrasted with Hootsuite by my supervisors. Using it for the first time, I couldn't seem to understand the mechanics of it on my own so, Aurora, another one of the supervisors on the board, set up a meeting with someone from the Sprout Social team. I was supposed to post Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, but instead, on Friday I met with Chelsea, our Sprout Social manager - she's going to be in charge of our account from here on. I told her we would be on a trial basis until next week when we have compared all the pros and cons of each scheduling tool. However, with Chelsea, I saw a lot more innovative tools than just scheduling on Sprout Social, and I was really fond of how insightful these tools appeared, some even better than Hootsuite. The most exciting function was the funnel feed to respond to comments all from the same forum - instead of having to go back and forth through each social media platform. And then, with design, not only can you create your post (through Canva on the same platform!) and captions but you can alter the first comment that appears on the post to include any extra messages or hashtags. All the metrics and KPIs and even specific post performance are downloadable through .pdf.

Chelsea made it impossible for me to see any cons other than the fact that its general design as a tool is made for one person to manage multiple accounts, whereas at Rotary, we have 3 social accounts that we'll ever use and the person managing those accounts will presumably be changing every couple of months. Along with the uncanny price tag of about $100 per month on the most basic plan, which limits being able to see certain features like optimal times to post. I have to help my team make this decision so I'm working on presenting all the pros and cons of Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and another option called Planeable which is not awful for what it's meant to do and is least expensive of the three. Because I have already messed with Hootsuite for my own social media, I played with Sprout Social and Planeable throughout the week. I posted through Sprout Social on Tuesday and Planeable on Wednesday.

On Thursday, I interviewed the next person to feature in our Member Spotlight, Chris Jordan. My previous work with Courtney Lewis was edited by both Shanna and J.R. Labbe. I found J.R.'s edits to be the most helpful in cinching up some of the points I made in the article while still conveying how Rotary's overall diversity is growing. The edited version does escape some of the facts, but I did forget that I'm writing a feature, not just about a person, but about an organization. Maybe some truths don't need to go public.

The first post of the week was for President's day, but I posted that like normal so I didn't feel the need to show here. These two were posted using Sprout Social (left) and Planeable (right).
I forgot to screenshot my work in Planeable, but here's what I did in Sprout Social.

I get the feeling that because my work was originally meant to be remote anyway, the winter weather storms this past week and before, have not affected my work agenda.

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