SCiP Success Stories

SCiP Success Profile: L’Arche Calgary       

SCiP internships produce many success stories for both organizations and students. One such story comes from L’Arche Calgary, which created a SCiP internship posting for a communications intern. After going through the interview process, they ultimately hired Gagan, a 21 year old Marketing major at Mount Royal University completing a Bachelor of Business Administration. Gagan’s role was optimizing the use of social media for organizational communications purposes and promoting special events.

L’Arche Communications Coordinator, Vern Begg, had only positive things to say about Gagan, remarking, “her enthusiasm for the project was evident in her initial interview and remained at a high level throughout her internship.” Gagan made a valuable contribution to L’Arche Calgary, introducing new methods of communicating the organization’s mission and story to internal and external stakeholders.

L’Arche Calgary found the process of creating the intern role description, and making the hire, to be a smooth process. According to Vern, “the forms that were provided streamlined the process and allowed us to focus on finding the right candidate.” Not only were the staff at L’Arche happy with their SCiP intern experience, they have already hired another SCiP intern!

 

SCiP Success Story: Calgary tour de nuit Society         

SCiP internships produce many success stories for both organizations and students. One great story comes from Calgary tour de nuit Society (CtndS) who have two SCiP marketing interns.

CtndS promotes cycling for both transportation and recreation – their mandate is ‘more people cycling more often’.  After posting the internships, Gary Beaton, Executive Director, hired SCiP students Mahsa Dokhani and Kristina Roberts. Their primary task at the beginning of the internship was evaluating a feasibility study conducted by the City of Calgary for a public bike rental system, a project with an estimated $3 million dollar price tag. The interns made a huge impact on both the CtdnS and Calgary as a whole.

The City of Calgary’s study recommended that the bike rental project should go ahead, but Mahsa and Kristina, after many hours of research and analysis, found the city did not yet have the sufficient infrastructure for the program to be successful. Mahsa and Kristina presented their findings to the City of Calgary`s Transportation and Transit Committee.

Their presentation proved to be very influential as council decided to shelve the report for another year, after they invested further in dedicated bike lanes. The presentation, in effect, saved the taxpayers of Calgary $3,000,000! Their findings had such a large impact that they have been invited to make their presentation at the ProWalk/ProBike conference in Long Beach California in September.

Mahsa and Kristina are still in the middle of their internship and are working on a number of other projects, including fundraising and promotion of the Ride the Road tour, the year’s largest event for CtndS. Both interns are receiving extremely valuable experience and found the process of applying for SCiP internships very easy and straightforward. Gary Beaton has nothing but glowing reviews of these students and the work they are doing for the organization and their community.

 

SCiP Interns a Big Help

If you, or someone in your organization, feel that there just aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done, why not post a SCiP internship? A few weeks back our Marketing and Communications Manager, Jenna, did just that! Jenna spends part of her day marketing SCiP so she thought, “why not hire an intern to both experience how the program works and to help me accomplish projects that have been on the backburner?”

Both of the projects she posted internships for had been in the back of her mind for a while so writing the role description was very easy. In writing the role descriptions, she tried to use language that post-secondary students would recognize from their classes – such as SWOT and PESTLE analysis – and tried to avoid words that we use in the sector like “capacity” or “knowledge transfer”. The most surprising thing the process though was that the bulk of applications were submitted on the first day the internships were posted. Even better than that, the applications she received were from high-quality candidates. The hardest part of the process was deciding who to hire for which internship!

With success stories like these, how can your organization afford not to have a SCiP intern? For more information on SCiP internships, please visit the SCiP website or contact Ellie at emcfarlane@volunteeralberta.ab.ca or 780.482.3300 ext. 232.