Week Five: Survey Launch and New York City

This was an exciting week to be an intern at Phoenix.  To start, we launched our University XP survey in order to collect our panel sample, as well as our convenience sample via social media.  I started to look at some of the data that came in from our convenience sample, and I was very intrigued by the way that the results broke up based on the school and gender of the respondent.  We are going to analyze the data from both samples early this week, and I am very intrigued by what we might discover.

I used the knowledge of Qualtrics that I gained from the University XP survey to program another survey for use at the Cynopsis Sports Business Summit which we attended on Thursday of last week.  This survey was for attendees of the conference to log into to enter into a sweepstakes/competition.  It was a little bit difficult to program at first, because we wanted it to be in a matching format, but that didn't seem to be possible.  Ultimately we ended up using a multiple choice/drop down bar format, because it was the cleanest option.

On Thursday, I attended the Cynopsis Sports Business Summit in New York City with several of my co-workers.  It was a great learning experience.  I was able to observe my dad and other co-workers networking with the numerous other people and companies represented, as well as to hear a lot about how the sports business is run and can be developed.  While I am not incredibly interested in going into the sports business, many of the lessons that I learned can be applied to nearly any business.  My dad was a part of one of the panels at the summit, and it was a great experience to see him speak about Phoenix, market research, and the industry in general.

For lunch on the day of the summit I was invited to lunch with two of the owners and founders of Phoenix.  It was a great experience to converse with these two great people, and I am so grateful to be interning at a company whose owners care so much about each of their employees, even a summer intern. 

Week Four: Practical Lessons

This week I learned two practical lessons in the world of market research: survey programming and dashboard creation.

Once the survey that I was working on with another intern was complete, one of the men from the office taught us how to use Qualtrics to program the survey to be an interactive questionnaire rather than a multiple choice Word document.  It is a fairly straight-forward process, but it forces you to think about how you want your survey to appear to someone who is taking it.  Do you want to force them to answer a question?  Do you want them to choose multiple answers?  How many?  If they aren't a college student do you want to ask them what college they attend?  It's a very logical process, and I enjoyed it.  Once the survey was programmed, we tested it a few times to look for mistakes and make corrections, and it will hopefully be in the field later this week.

As an office we learned from one of our co-workers how to make dashboards for client reports.  Dashboards are interactive Excel spreadsheets that utilize pivot tables to present the data that we find in a visually appealing and easy to use way for clients.  I had never used pivot tables before, but they are a great way to summarize a large data set.  From the pivot tables you then use the VLookUp formula to create graphs and slicers to make the dashboard interactive. 

During the dashboard lessons we discussed the merits of using Microsoft Powerpoint vs. Microsoft Excel in reports.  While Powerpoint used to be the go to program to use (and still is, depending on the kind of report), new formatting options in Excel are making a more viable option due to its interactive potential.

I have learned countless lessons through this internship already, and this week I have learned many practical skills that I can use in school and business in the future.

Week Three: Learning the Process and Adding Value

This week I spent most of my time working on a survey for college students in order to alter our new UniversityXP/Higher Ed XP product to better meet the needs of future clients.  This has entailed working with another intern in the office to develop questions and format the survey so that we can program it this week.  This process has taught me a lot about the process for creating and implementing a survey.  When it goes out in the field, we are going to compare results from a convenience sample we get from social media and personal networking to a panel sample.

The creation of this survey has made me think a lot about what the goal is which each question.  We don't want to waste time and effort on our part or the part of those who will be taking the survey by asking questions that we won't have any use for the results.  This encourages forward thinking and planning ahead, which was also an important aspect of the Sales in the Startup class I was in this past semester.  Each time we write a question we have to then ask ourselves "why?" what purpose does the question serve?  I'm excited to see the results when we're able to get this programmed and out in the field, and I'm especially excited to compare the convenience sample and the panel sample.  I'm finding more and more over the past year that I really enjoy collecting information and thinking about it, even if it doesn't hold much meaning for me in the moment, so it will be interesting to see this data applied to an actual business product.

In marketing different aspects of Phoenix in general the importance of value proposition is being reinforced for me.  It seems like we have talked about value proposition and bringing value to customers in every entrepreneurship and business class that I've taken at Grove City College, and I'm finding it at work in the "real world" too.  In meetings, my coworkers are constantly talking about how to present what sets Phoenix apart and how we bring value to clients that other companies cannot do.  That last part is the important piece.  It seems easier to address what value you are able to create for a customer, but it can become difficult to word why a client would choose you over your competitor.  If you miss this part and do not present what sets you apart, you can lose business simply because your potential client didn't know the full story as to why your company would have been a better match.

Week Two: Let People Do What They Do

My big lesson for this week was to let people play to their strengths, especially when I don't have the same strengths.  In working on the infographics this week I hit a dead end and we sent the document to another woman who works for the company in marketing.  In less than twenty four hours she had taken the same graphics and statistics that I used, but put them together in a way that they fit on the page cohesively, lent themselves to a reading flow, and were visually appealing.  The final product still is not ready, but I am going to attach the different iterations of the infographics up to this point to show the work that I've done.  I started with Apple in order to get a template that could be used for each of the companies, and after receiving the new and improved versions back changed the data to apply to each of the other companies.

This is the initial infographic that I created

This is the second iteration, which I tried to incorporate a call to action.  I struggled to make all of the elements fit cohesively in this version.

This is the version that was done by the woman in marketing.  

This is an iteration of the infographic for which I used the version the other woman created and altered it for Garmin.

I continued to see pieces of my classes at work this week.  One instance that really hit close to home for me was in a progress meeting for one of the projects that the company is currently working on.  One of our partners wanted to charge more than had been previously agreed upon for a project that was to commence the next day.  We discussed ways to do the project without this partner, but ultimately decided that we had to swallow the cost because the client was expecting us to use this partner and we wanted to deliver what we promised we would.  This reminded me of my Sales project this past semester.  My group mates and I were doing a fundraiser in which we partnered with our local ice cream shop and sold our professors ice cream cups to surprise their students with at the end of the semester.  It was a hugely successful project from which we learned a lot, but on the night when we scooped the ice cream to fulfill our orders we realized that we were going to need twice as much ice cream as we thought, and we had to decide whether to deliver very small cups of ice cream or to swallow the additional cost and deliver a satisfactory product to our professors.  We decided to swallow the additional cost and deliver a satisfactory product, but we were ultimately lucky in that we were mistaken about the original cost and ended spending the same amount of money that we initially planned on.

In just the first two weeks of this internship I have already learned so much and seen so much of my schoolwork at play in "the real world."  I'm really enjoying this experience and I'm excited to see what the rest of the summer holds.