First Week Interning with Quarry Theatre!

This week was the first week of my internship with Quarry Theatre. Quarry Theatre is a non-profit theatre company in Baltimore who explores history through the lens of live performance. They are currently working on a production called ‘Meditations on Nationalism’ which will premier in Baltimore this July.
The first thing I did to kick start the internship was sit down with Ryan Clark, the Artistic Director, and discuss expectations for the semester. Additionally, we set out a few short term goals to accomplish in the following months. These goals include increasing following on Facebook and Twitter, create print materials to solicit donations, design and maintain the website, and increase the website’s google ranking through SEO.
This week I also finished designing their website (www.quarrytheatre.com). Throughout the design process, I used a lot of concepts and tricks learned in Web design 1 & 2 in order to design an accessible website. Utilizing HTML/CSS I was able to successfully design a website for the organization. This has already impacted the organizations reach and ability to get donations. In this first week of having the website active, we have had over 200 people visit the website and have collected a couple hundred dollars in donations through website traffic. I was able to use Google Analytics to analyze the website traffic to the site and where most people were coming from. I will use the analytics collected this week to update our marketing tactics. For example, many website visitors came from our link posted on Facebook, so we will continue to post links to the website when interacting with followers on social media.Quarry Theatre Website Snapshot
meditations flyer
I also designed a flyer for the upcoming production of ‘Meditations on Nationalism’. My supervisor, Ryan, wanted a design that could be used to promote the show and get the word out about Quarry Theatre. Using Adobe Illustrator and downloaded fonts I was able to come up with a few different design options. After meeting with Ryan and discussing the various designs, we both decided on the flyer to the left. In the upcoming weeks I will be talking with print shops to get quotes on printing the flyers and additional materials.

One thing that proved to be of difficulty this week was figuring out how to make the website “live.” In all of my web design classes we have focused on coding and design but never touched on File Transfer Protocol and connecting your files to a host and then the domain name. Luckily, I had the internet to help me. With some additional research and a little trial and error, I was able to successfully upload the website files and make the site live through our hosing service. While it was a daunting task, I feel very comfortable if I needed to set up a site in the future because of this experience.
The last thing I did was set up domain based emails for everyone in the company. Doing some research I found a free hosting service called ZOHO which would allow us to have domain based emails for all of the staff (name@quarrytheatre.com). This was something that I brought up to Ryan and suggested we looked into. Since the organization is a non-profit and doesn’t have a lot of money to spend on outside resources, I was happy to come across this service. I was able to connect the ZOHO service to our domain name by editing the DNS records that are stored with our domain service provider. I has very excited that this process worked. These email addresses give a professional touch to email when we are communicating with donors.
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It was a crazy week of designing, meeting, and tweeting but I learned so much in such a short time. I look forward to helping Quarry Theatre with all of their marketing efforts this semester.

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