Projects

Internal FP&M Newsletter & "What's your job?" Story

For my strategic communications specialist internship with the FP&M division of UW, I contributed heavily to the bi-weekly newsletter that is sent to all FP&M employees. Topics mostly include upcoming events, local wellness sessions, energy or hydration challenges, Employee Recognition Award nominations, etc. I also wrote "What's your job?" stories that highlight the roles of employees to bring awareness to the various jobs in the division. For both assignments, I used WiscWeb — the university version of WordPress — and Mailchimp. From these tasks, I learned the importance of a PR mindset and the need to consider how an organization is perceived, the necessity of recognizing hard work and how to balance design elements with concise information.

23andMe Cybersecurity Incident Report

For LIS 510: Human Factors in Information Security, we had a project for a good portion of the semester to explore a recent data breach and write an incident report. I investigated a 2023 23andMe breach that leaked genetic, demographic, location and health information for eventually around 6.9 million people. In both the presentation and essay, my goal was to communicate not just a timeline of what occurred, but also a few steps that should be taken by the company to prevent future attacks. These strategies include multi-factor authentication during login, an established IT team that can patch vulnerabilities and implementing an indicator of compromise mechanism. From this assignment, I learned a lot about the cybersecurity industry, how attackers leverage insecure platforms, how to effectively communicate to a wide audience of employees and how to use technical jargon in an essay format. These soft skills will benefit me in any career moving forward.

Newsletter Metrics Analytics Project

For my communications and marketing internship at FP&M, I collected data from our digital Mailchimp biweekly newsletter performance in order to measure engagement and identify areas of improvement. I reviewed audience number, open and click rates, word count, topic number, the three most-clicked links, the time of day delivered, etc. for each newsletter from the start of 2021 through the end of 2024. I generated graphs and completed calculations that led to a few conclusions about what content most appeals to our internal employees, what to prioritize in our newsletter production process and how to be successful in terms of metric-supported engagement. This project developed my data analytics skills and helped me form ties between statistics and the creative production of this medium. In addition, I presented my findings to the Marketing and Communications team, which was an exercise in professional verbal communication.