Date published: 10 March 2015 by Jessica Homer

My name is Bea and I’m the Digital Marketing intern here at Rainbow Trust Children’s Charity. I’ve just graduated from the University of Salford, Manchester after studying Media for the last three years. After Uni, I was a bit stuck for what to do - I loved working in television and radio but was increasingly interested in social media, namely YouTube. The new way companies were using online content creators such as YouTubers, bloggers and vloggers to market and advertise their products is something I found very exciting. I knew I wanted to get involved in this emerging world but without professional experience, I wasn’t sure how.

I had heard of Rainbow Trust whilst I was at school and my dad had been to networking events with people who had worked for the charity, so when he told me there were some internships available at the charity’s headquarters in Leatherhead, I immediately looked it up on their website. There were two internships that would have been great but I was really excited by the Digital Marketing one since it would involve me getting to better grips with all aspects of social media.

I was very surprised and happy when I got the phone call telling me I had been successful in my interview. I was so appreciative that the Marketing team decided to take a chance on me even though I didn’t have professional experience. They told me that my passion and initiative was more important which was brilliant because starting out is always hard and now I had three months of experience ahead of me to learn as much as possible.

On my first day I was very nervous, but very excited to have my first office experience, meet all the team and start learning everything. They threw me in at the deep end, by having me join their big meeting where we were on a conference call with their other offices around the country 10 minutes after arriving! However this turned out to be an amazing start to the day because I got to meet everyone and hear the updates of each department. Another amazing part was that Rainbow Trust’s founder, Bernadette Cleary, joined us and I got to hear how and why she started Rainbow Trust. This was incredibly inspiring and a brilliant introduction to the charity and what they did.

I was then shown how all of the systems worked, my desk, and of course where the tea cupboard was! I was told I would be given a project to work on, which was to revamp their YouTube account. This was brilliant and I loved researching other charities and developing a strategy to help gain more subscribers and views which will hopefully lead to more donations and volunteers to help this very worthy cause! I have learnt so much already and can’t wait to see how the rest of the internship goes and what I will be able to pick up along the way.

Bea Kerslake, Digital Intern

If you are interested in doing an internship with Rainbow Trust, visit our careers section.