In the Summer of 2018, I had the opportunity to intern with Kansas Foundation for Agriculture in the Classroom (KFAC) in Manhattan, Kansas. My adviser passed along information to me that they were hiring a Communications and Database intern. I was excited to apply for this opportunity as I had not yet had an internship. This was also a great opportunity to build my portfolio which was pretty bare at that time. Broadening my knowledge of how nonprofits work was another benefit of this position.
KFAC’s mission is connecting classrooms to Kansas agriculture. They are able to do this by providing free lesson plans for teachers, resources such as the Kansas Kids Connection magazines, professional development opportunities and much more. This would not be possible without the support from their donors, as well as grants.
From the beginning of my internship, I could tell that KFAC wanted to change their brand style. To start this process, we used colors from our current logo. We had recently started to build a new website, which had been a project even before they hired me. On our new website, we needed to update all of our lesson plans and resources for teachers. We also wanted more analytics to show who was downloading our lesson plans and which ones were actually getting downloaded. With this new website, we were able to do just that.
I was assigned to make new templates for all of our materials to match the look of the new website. I started with making a new lesson plan template and updating more than 45 lesson plans in this template. I then moved on to our companion resources, which all had to be updated a bit differently, but with a cohesive brand. This was not a simple task since there were so many of them, but with time and patience I was able to complete each task.
Another big task was our Foundation on the First, which is a monthly newsletter that we send out to donors and teachers to stay up to date on what KFAC is doing. We wanted to put news, our teacher feature, a donor feature and a lesson plan feature into the newsletter.
After our website was complete, we decided we needed new marketing resources for when we travel. We needed three brochures; one for our Agri-Tag, an about us card and a support brochure. It was up to me to design these, and I really wanted to make sure they matched KFAC’s brand. Making each of these brochures took time and they each needed their own look so they are easily identifiable but also separate from each other. We also made new business cards that matched our new brand colors as well.
During my internship, I got to use skills that I was taught in AgCom courses that I had never been able to use before. One of my big projects was to create a logo for our school year theme, “Plants on the Planet.” For our school year theme, we are able to take lesson plans and resources that fit the theme and put them all together for teachers. For my logo design, I had to draw the Earth in Illustrator as well as crops like grain sorghum, milo, corn and sunflowers. Once each part of the logo was done, I was able to bring them into Indesign for the finished product.
Interning at KFAC has been a learning experience for me, not just as a communicator but as a professional. The freedom I have been given to create real materials on my own has been a great asset to prepare me for my future career. My boss, a K-State agcom alumna, has helped me with projects while working in Adobe, resumes and even cover letters. This has made my internship so much more memorable than it already is and I know that I will be ready for my future when I graduate.