Summer intern project

Bit of grind work today for our summer intern (me) locating contact details for all the student union activities officers for each university.  Given our success with Keele University, I think this is the point of contact on campus most likely to be interested in the concept and also be able to offer the greatest support in spreading the word on campus (if we can’t make it in person).

Social media is go!

LinkedIn and Facebook accounts now up and running.  Looks like we finally have a social media presence.  Guess I need to start tweeting and posting.  Should be fun!

Social media is starting to come together

Lots of little activities to keep me busy: setting up social media accounts and starting to populate them with a bit of content.  Twitter and Google+ accounts now up and running.

First win!

The old saying "it's not what you know..." proved true today as a former colleague at the Pharmacy I used to work at (Bhavika Patel) was able to help bring in our first win!  Bhavika is working this year on the student union of Keele University and was able to share our idea with her team.  They seemed to like the idea and are keen to help out and so a massive thanks to our best friend Bhav for helping us getting the ball rolling.  I'm hoping this will be the first of many wins for us on the road ahead.

Better late than never

Update from Base Creative: Revised timeline for delivery sees us go live on the 13th of August!  A whole month’s delay!  Clearly, they haven’t even started the coding.  At least we have a firm date to work towards and weekly milestones to check in on.  Will be watching them like a hawk!

Ok, deep breath, here we go again – at least the website build has now commenced.

The waiting game

Update from Base Creative: the team will be reviewing the build and timing and be back to us tomorrow with a revised schedule. Am not a happy client and have let them know that.  We will be discussing a discount on the final invoice following delivery of the website.  Will wait and see what tomorrow brings.

The new career honeymoon is already over :-(

Very disappointed to find out at 17:00 on the Friday before the scheduled launch of the beta site on Monday that the design agency we are using to build the website have had a problem with resourcing to code the site and so the website will be delayed a further month!  Absolutely ridiculous that the project manager didn’t get in touch to warn us of the potential delays.  I guess the lesson learned for me is not to trust anyone you deal with in business to come through on their end of the bargain.  Very unexpected as they were absolutely brilliant in the design phase of the project and were one of the few firms who actually understood the underlying concept of the business when we were doing RFPs.  In retrospect I should have been asking for daily/weekly updates to ensure things were on track – that way I would have been aware of the problem early.  Oh well, I guess we have to learn these lessons at some point.

 

Unfortunately, it has impacted on our initial awareness campaign and so will have to cancel our initial marketing activities and refocus on the university/college campus drive at the start of September.  Grrrrr (that’s my angry growl)