Nicholas Barry

This is part of an ongoing series of posts about creating and strengthening an internship program. The posts are compiled on the Internships page.

Interns can help your organization extend its reach without increasing its staff budget. Interns are much more than just free labor; they can also contribute their creativity and energy. You can provide an excellent opportunity for interns who want to acquire specific job skills, and who want to learn about nonprofits more generally. If you already take on interns, you can probably improve your program.

IS YOUR ORGANIZATION READY FOR AN INTERNSHIP PROGRAM?

Before you embark on creating an internship program, be sure an internship program will really work for you. Consider:

Will you have time to oversee an intern (or interns)? A smart, skilled intern will not require hand-holding, but you will still need to commit some up-front time training a new intern, and some ongoing time to answer questions and oversee your intern. A good, well-chosen intern can help lighten your load, but if you can’t even spare a few minutes to get someone started, taking on an intern won’t be practical.

Is there real, meaningful work for the intern? Most interns want more than just a learning experience – they want to know they’re making a genuine difference for your organization. They’ll be unhappy if they feel they’re doing make-work. On the other hand, while interns may be willing to do grunt work all day, you won’t be making the best use of them if you don’t give them a chance to stretch their wings by making full use of their skills. They can contribute more if you give them something they can take responsibility for.

Are the skills and positions you’re looking for appropriate for an unpaid intern? If you are looking for a position that requires a lot of expertise or confidentiality, you may be better off hiring someone.

Recall the story of Rumpelstiltskin, in which a miller’s daughter is locked into a tower after her father promises the king she can spin straw into gold. Imagine the possibilities of someone who can turn worthless straw into valuable gold! Now, imagine that your nonprofit (or other community organization) can spin its own gold.

The Charismatic Organization makes the startling assertion that the most important resource for an organization is social capital. And unlike other resources (financial capital, physical capital, human capital), organizations can create social capital from scratch.

What is social capital, and what makes it so valuable? Social capital is the cumulative strength of connections and relationships between people. In fact, you frequently invest in your own personal social capital – when you do, you probably call it networking. In an organization, a strong, cohesive, productive culture represents a large amount of social capital. An organization with few lines of communication between different departments, or to the outside world, lacks social capital.

Social capital is valuable in part because it gives an organization access to other forms of capital (e.g. financial and human capital). Shirley Sagawa and Deborah Jospin, the authors, make the case that organizations should focus first on building internal social capital, then use that to build external social capital. This will bring more money, participants and recognition to your organization, not to mention more success.

How does an organization build social capital internally? Sagawa and Jospin emphasize the importance of having a mission your entire organization understands, building a strong, cooperative culture, and “people-focused management.”

A reliance on data and a habit for innovation, are two other aspects of a successful organization that do not pertain directly to building social capital, but which are nonetheless important. Your organization may be motivated to move quickly, but without the right data, you can’t be sure you’re moving in the right direction. Constant innovation helps keep the organization adapted to its environment.

Once an organization has built internal social capital, it can use that capital to build external social capital through active communications and outreach. The mistake many organizations make at this point is having too few ways to get involved – many organizations only involve outsider as donors and newsletter recipients. Charismatic organizations provide myriad ways people can get involved.

The Charismatic Organization presents an interesting, fresh and unique perspective on the strategies to build a successful organization. The book challenges you to build social capital in your organization. And after reading this book, I, for one, am ready to begin.

Changes are taking place quickly here in the internship program! These are actually updates from a month ago, but things have been so fast-paced that I haven't had time to write about them until now.  

I used to be concerned about starting up intern mentoring (as I've mentioned before). The intern retreat we held convinced me that senior interns actually wanted to be relied on as experts. I was still worried that setting up interns to mentor each other might be logistically difficult.  

Well, I should have trusted more in the skills of my intern crew. When Ryan started up in early June, I told him to ask Mark and Jeysree (two senior interns) questions. Both of them were extremely helpful in getting him started. Besides saving me work, this had two unexpected benefits: I got to see how other interns did tasks (which allowed me to make corrections), and it built morale between the interns.  

Our first completely intern-planned ownership initiative was completed, as well! Jeysree and Mark carried out the first of the Community Office Hours successfully. Now that Mark and Jeysree will both be gone from the office, I'll have my first practice transitioning a project to a new set of interns.  

Last month I also started Jeysree on our first official Learning Project. The idea of the Learning Projects is that we will offer interns specific skills to learn, and assign them a project (e.g., an ownership initiative) that will force them to practice this skill. The ultimate goal is for them to become proficient at a new skill.  

Jeysree was working with the Prezi presentation platform (prezi.com). I haven't quite figured out a way to integrate learning projects, though - they sit a bit uncomfortably alongside the ownership initiative structure. Ideally they would mesh, but I'm having trouble finding ways to work them together. Perhaps I need to spend more time matchmaking between interns, skills they'd like to learn, and projects that could benefit from those skills.  

The success of the learning projects idea may depend on whether interns are more attracted to a project because of the skills it will offer them, because of the project itself, or because of the people already working on the project. If the latter two are strong attractors, I may need to focus on assigning learning projects to interns already on projects, rather than trying to match interns based on skills they want to learn.

I promised myself I wouldn't do any work this week on vacation, either on Davis Dollars or for Senator Steinberg's office. Co-op Camp is a beautiful camp in the Sierras, and I only see most of my friends from camp once a year.

Well, I didn't quite end up doing work...but I also did end up getting involved in two different flavors of management while at camp (as the Teen Director, and in general camp management). I'm now involved in managing Davis Dollars, the internship program in Senator Steinberg's office, the Davis Cooperative Community Network, and Co-op Camp.

I've been the Teen Director at camp for about five years now, but this year I've really taken the program to a new level. While my role in previous years was really not much more than chaperon, this year I've been leading the teens in running projects and workshops for each other.

I met with them at the beginning of the week to talk about what activities they'd like to do, and particularly what skills they'd like to learn, and to share with each other. Emily led a workshop on handstands and cartwheels, for example. Keith led a handful of teens in getting video testimonials about camp from every camper, so we can share what makes this camp so special. I treated my job as director much more like my role at Davis Dollars and in Senator Steinberg's office - I'm focusing on empowering the teens to create programs they're interested in, instead of relying on me to entertain them.

I'm also making my first forays into general camp management, at the invitation of the three current camp managers. Because many of the campers come from co-ops of one sort or another, lots are interested in helping make camp a better place, but many I've spoken to have found it difficult to get involved. I know Heather, Chip and Victor (the three current managers) feel overwhelmed by everything they have to accomplish every year. (They're not paid.) I think everyone would agree that the three of them have become a bottleneck purely by virtue of the huge amount of work that has to go through them, and I think we would all like to share the work around a bit more.

So when Heather invited me to take on a management role, I took the opportunity to talk to her, Chip and Victor, and several others interested in getting more involved about how we could make it easier to campers to contribute to preparation for camp.

I started by creating a Google Group to replace our old email list so that we could have a small group of administrators authorized to email to our entire list. (Previously every email had to go through Heather, Chip or Victor, and it wasn't feasible for them to handle this all on their own.) This will make it easier for other campers to let everyone know about camper meet-ups during the year, fundraisers, and other important news.

I also created a set of Google Documents to help us coordinate on our various activities during the year. This way campers can log in and find out, for example, that we still need $1,500 in prizes for our auction, and can begin to solicit donations from businesses. (Before, this would have required prior authorization from Heather, Chip or Victor, and things get slowed down when 20 people who want to contribute in different ways all have to filter through three people.) In a lot of ways this isn't any different from all my other management experience - I'm trying to empower people to make a contribution. People want to get involved, and it's just a matter of making it easy for them to do so in a coordinated manner.

Nonprofits and community organizations are often chronically understaffed, and I'm wary of getting involved in Co-op Camp management because I don't want to be drawn into a huge tangle of tasks to get camp coordinated for next year. As I get involved, I'll insist on being given specific responsibilities, and the freedom to accomplish those responsibilities with minimal interference. As I've found from managing my hordes of interns, people are a lot more interested in doing grunt work if it's in the service of a responsibility they've been given than they are in doing grunt work that has been assigned to them.

As with my interns, my ideal contribution would be to enable campers to share their talents to improve camp. There are lots of folks who want to help put on the carnival, or bring new campers, or offer a great workshop. Right now the centralized management structure has made it difficult for some people to contribute. Heather, Chip and Victor recognize this, and were happy to hear that the Google Documents might encourage people to put their heads together outside of camp to prepare for next year.

So now I just have to figure out how to share information and responsibility in a meaningful way, while helping coordinate everyone’s contributions so collaboration doesn’t turn into chaos. Wish me luck!

I just calculated interns' hours as full-time equivalent (FTE) employees. If you're not familiar with this, it means adding up all their hours per week and dividing by 40 (for a 40-hour work week), which can give you the equivalent number of full-time employees. So we have 16 interns right now, but only two are genuinely full time. All their hours together come to 4.78 FTE interns! I think it will be closer to 6 during July.

Here's a graph of my FTE intern management experience over time:

My interns, apparently, aren't as wild about initiative as I thought they'd be. It turns out they want a bit more structure.

We recently had an Intern Retreat - we got all the interns together to talk about how things were going, and to ask them to suggest improvements. A few quick findings:

• Everyone seems to really like the program - they had plenty of improvements to suggest, but hardly any complaints. I'm always open to complaints, so I don't think they were just biting their tongues out of fear.
• Interns like the freedom they're given to dream up their own projects, but also really want some preapproved projects to choose from if they just want to get started on something.
• Experienced interns really wanted more opportunities to act as leaders and help mentor newer interns. I've been wanting to start a mentoring program for a while, but feared that the older interns would view it as a hassle. Au contraire!

I'll write another post soon about the intern mentoring I've started up. I have also begun an Internships page of this website to describe what I've learned about starting and running an internship program. For now, I'll start with my biggest surprise, which was that most interns seemed to want more vetted projects.

When I dreamed up the idea of ownership initiatives, I thought the biggest appeal would be that interns could think up their own projects. One of the aspects of my job that I've always valued the most has been the freedom to initiate a project I thought would benefit the office, and I imagined interns would clamor at the opportunity to do the same. So I developed the ownership initiatives around the idea that interns would propose an idea, then investigate how to turn that idea into a feasible project.

Well, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that things don't always go as smoothly as I imagined. There are at least three things that stand in the way of my idealized vision:

• Many interns - even motivated, creative interns - don't come in with a good understanding of what sorts of projects our office will want to take on.
• Roadblocks, often completely unexpected, can derail good ideas, which is frustrating for interns.
• Most of our interns are energetic and don't want to spend weeks investigating a potential project before getting started - they want to get started now.

What interns need is a pool of vetted projects they can get started on immediately, which have been cleared of roadblocks, and which I know will further the cause of our office (providing assistance to constituents, and providing a communication channel between constituents and Senator Steinberg).

The ownership initiatives now have a slightly different focus. Instead of trumpeting the benefits of being able to work on projects that interns can design on their own, we emphasize the appeal of having ownership (responsibility and commitment) over a project. We help new interns find places on existing projects. I spend time making sure projects aren't getting stuck. What I still need to implement is a list of fully-vetted projects with notes on how to get started.

Beyond that, I talk to interns about ideas they may want to pursue on their own. I know that there are interns who want to design projects of their own, and I want to make that possible. But I also realize that not everyone wants to invent a completely new program; they just want the opportunity to contribute something of value for which they will be recognized.

Being effective and accountable requires that you be able to control your environment, and this sometimes means you have to manage your peers (or your boss) to make sure you get what you need.

I'm fortunate because my peers are all responsible, talented people who do good work. I know I can rely on them. Despite this, I still sometimes need to manage them a little bit to make sure I can deliver on my commitments. They manage me a bit, as well, if I haven't gotten back to them about something they need.

For example, I keep very good track of which response letters I've sent to Karen for review. If I haven't heard back on something for several days, I'll drop in her office and check up on it. I tell my interns to do the same thing with me - if they haven't heard back about a letter they sent to me, they should ask me what's going on with it, to make sure I haven't misplaced it or forgotten it.

The important thing, in my mind, is to keep track of what you depend on others for (whether those "others" are your subordinates, colleagues, or bosses). Hold them accountable to what they have committed to delivering to you. Do it in a friendly way, but let them know that you rely on them to accomplish your own tasks on time.

I hate Powerpoint. Do you hate Powerpoint? Almost everyone I know hates it. Normally I don't write about technology stuff here, but this is important, because so many people give mind-numbingly boring presentations using Powerpoint.

I was recently at a conference, and was blown away by several presentations I watched by two presenters. I asked one of them afterward, and she told me she had used the web service called Prezi to produce the presentations. Below is the first presentation I made using Prezi. Without the benefit of our narration, you may not get much content out of the presentation, but you can see how the presentation looks and feels.

What makes Prezi amazing is two things, in my mind. First, it uses a completely different paradigm from Powerpoint. Prezi is not based on slides, and does not force you to chop up complex ideas into slide-sized pieces. It also doesn't force you to shoehorn a nonlinear idea into a linear format. The way it accomplishes this is through a completely different, non-slide paradigm. Instead, it provides you with a blank, endless canvas on which to formulate ideas and draw diagrams. You create a presentation by choosing a path through the canvas. This makes it easy to create a narrative that doubles back on itself, returns to earlier points, and shows hierarchical and interrelated ideas.

The second thing that makes Prezi amazing is its professional look and feel when presenting. When you create a path throughout your canvas, Prezi automatically zooms and rotates the view as necessary to focus on whatever you want to show your audience. The result is a wonderfully polished presentation. It takes much less effort to create a beautiful presentation than it would with Powerpoint.

Because of the ease of creating engaging presentations that don't oversimplify complicated issues, I would love to see more people using this web service. Try it out!