Excel Sheet After Excel Sheet

This week, I continued with my contact list process.  Let me explain, in detail, the following step, after inputing the lists into the PatronMail system.  PatronMail exported a list of “bad emails” and “opted outs.” I then focused on continuing to search out and delete those emails.  To say this process is tedious to the point of going a bit insane, as I scanned roughly twenty excel sheets, for these obnoxious emails, is not a dramatization.  I spent all of Tuesday, June 12^th, and half of Wednesday, June 13^th, trying to wrap this up.  But what I was not aware of, was that this project would be endless.

            As I went through the lists, finding these emails, I track my progress in a clear way.  As I erased the bad email, I kept the other info from the contact and marked the email column with “Bad Email from PatronMail List 6/12.”  This way, I could evaluate how old some of the lists were, based on how many of the contacts had this bold, underlined, red label. 

            While my boss also enjoyed seeing how I had tracked the bad emails, through the excel lists, she advised me on how to proceed.  She told me to print the lists out, so we could have them on record.  Then she advised me to go ahead and delete the entire contact that had a bad email.  Her reason was intelligent, saying that if the email was bad, then there is a fair chance the contact does not exist anymore.  And this summarizes my eighth week on the job.     

Hiccup

This week, my internship had a hiccup.  I can into work on Tuesday, June 19^th, with the beginnings of a head cold.  The museum had the opening of a brand new exhibit, Faberge: Imperial Jeweler to the Tsars, coming within days.  With that, my boss was not reluctant at all to tell me to go home.  I’m sure she wanted me to rest and get better, but she was more threatened by the potential contagion of her entire staff, which could not happen at that critical moment, when every second counts. 

            So I gladly retired for the day, went home and rested.  But the next Monday, I woke up feeling worse.  I emailed my boss to let her know my condition, and she response was very humorous.  I knew she would have no intention of wanting to see me until I was one hundred and fifty percent better, which she communicated saying “for my sanity, please remain in your bubble.  My bubble is too fragile right now.”  So I did not make it back to work until the following Tuesday, June 26^th, when I was in perfect condition.  Luckily, I will work over 150 hours at the Bowers Museum this summer, which is twice what the History 398 asks for, so this hiccup will not affect that factor.

Flashback

My internship for week 6, June 12^th and 13^th, was occupied with the same extensive, tedious, administrative project I have been handed of locating, editing, and updating all the contact lists of the entire Bowers database.  Unfortunately, I am not sure what to discuss this week, with already having explained the entire process of how I go about this project, step by step.  So instead, this week I would like to describe the environment I work in, contrasted to my environment last summer.

            I sit in the Communications and Branding department, which is different, was last summer, when I interned at the museum. Last summer, my desk was in the Marketing department, which is a descent size room, holding four cubicles and a five-person conference table.   The two other interns for the marketing department in the 2011 summer session were hired on about two weeks after myself.  The three of us (Megan, Gentry, and myself) had an exciting summer, full of loud laughs.  Our boss, Nancy Johnson, would have to come around the corner at least once a day to hush our laughs.  But even though we were a bit hyper for a museum, the three of us had a great, creative mix flowing.  We wrote multiple press releases that stunned our boss. 

The desk I occupy this summer is about ten feet from my boss, Nancy Johnson, but not within eyesight.  She repeatedly forgets I am even there and finds it stunning how quiet and attentive I am this summer.  It is a much quieter room, with the walls stacked with binders, each one containing all the information to catalogue every exhibit the museum has opened.  This of course serves a pertinent purpose.  If, for some tragic reason, the museums’ hard drives get destroyed, than at least there is a hard copy.  That way, if the museum gets an exhibit to return, we do not have to start from scratch in composing a successful exhibit.  We have the entire life of the exhibit already catalogue for reference.  Very smart, in my opinion, but then again, I naturally organize everything.  

Needles in the Haystacks

            Week 5, Tuesday June 5th and Wednesday June 6th, I continued working on the contact lists project in the database.  With the work I had completed the week before, all the contact lists had been gathered, formatted, and the duplicate lists had been deleted.  From this point, I uploaded these updated lists into the Patron Mail System.  This system is where all of the museums’, hopefully, up to date contacts are contained.  This system makes it easy and efficient for the museum to send out email blasts of coming exhibits, events, speakers, workshops, etc. 

            So what I did, to make the “updating” stage of the now organized contact lists easier, was to input the lists into the Patron Mail System.  Then I sent out a mock “e-blast,” to see which emails bounced back as “bad emails” or contacts who “opted out.”  The list I got back from Patron Mail was exhausting looking!  Out of roughly fourteen hundred emails, I got seven hundred and eighty two that bounced back on me.

            Next stage of the tedious process, I began the search for the needle in the haystack.  The list purely contained the bad emails.  There was no indication of which list the email was from, or the name of the person whom the contact belonged to.  So I basically had to go on a crazy hunt, through roughly twenty-five lists, each with hundreds of name, organizations, phone numbers, addresses, and emails, to find the bad emails and delete them. 

            Inputting the lists into Patron Mail took all of a half an hour.  It was the mad search for each needle in the valley of haystacks that consumed the rest of my week.     And the process would continue into my 6^th week on the job, but more on that when it comes.  This entire project is exhausting and obnoxious, to say the least, but in the long run, is type of work is what is key to making a non-profit not only thrive, but purely live.