Welcome to the latest installment in our series on the “Day in the Life” of nonprofit communicators! This series lets you describe your workday in your own words.
Laurice Grae-Hauck is a marketer passionate about social justice, art equity, and dismantling oppressive systems. In the not so near future, she plans to get her Master of Divinity and Leadership Studies at Meadville Lombard Theological School. In her free time, she loves to spend time outdoors with and cooking for family and friends, and is a prevention educator in the areas of sexual and domestic violence.
And this is her typical day:
Before 8:00 a.m. – My daughter wakes me up before the alarm does most days. At 8 years old I am grateful that she still wants to snuggle with us, but that usually means we’re behind schedule.
I take the dogs downstairs and put them in the yard while I make a carafe of coffee.
Shower while coffee brews.
8:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m – Get the kiddo breakfast, pack our lunches, feed the dogs, find her shoes, run upstairs 15 times for various forgotten items, unplug the EV, pull out of the garage, remember something, run back in the house, see that my husbands car is behind me in the driveway, move his car, we’re on our way!
Drop-off the kiddo, check traffic, determine fastest way to work and realize there’s a Target on the way so stop to pick up dog food (and likely a cute top for my daughter).
At stop lights or gridlocked traffic, I respond to any comments that came in on social overnight and set an unreasonable movement/step goal for the day. If traffic isn’t awful I get to the office by 9:15 and meditate for 12 minutes. Thank you, Calm!
After I’m calm, I look at my calendar and panic. Did I really schedule a call with a new staff person at 9:45 to walk them through the back-end of the member area of our website? While there I realize that one of our members pages has been mysteriously unpublished so I open a support ticket with our web developer.
10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. – After I purge the email for the “emergencies” (really, in arts marketing I’d love a definition of “emergency”) I tackle the quick responses. If I can get 5 emails out of the way in a couple of minutes I feel like I have accomplished something.
Then I head to my TweetDeck to see what my member theatres are up to in my list. I retweet one thing and schedule something for later. On Wednesdays I track Instagram stats. We’re a small budget NGO so I can’t pay for fancy tracking so I run a Google sheet with all the basic insights.
I’ve got a little bit of time to work on the design of our gala invitation that should have been to the printer yesterday.
12:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m – Time for a call with my marketing committee! Working in committees is hard and time consuming, and often painfully slow, but I generally feel better about the outcome, having included more folks and listened to their needs.
After, I will take five minutes to walk around the block because I probably haven’t left my chair yet.
2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m – Time for discounts blast! Our organization runs a discount ticketing site, and by our org I mean me. Once a week I send out a blast with all the “insider deals”. When it goes out I will craft a social post for Friday about the weekend deals, design images/gif/video for various sites and schedule them.
Shoot. I forgot to eat! Grab a week-past-its-date yogurt from the fridge and a coffee and we’re back on track.
There’s a conference call I have to be on but am just listening for action items, so I can check in with all the social and email while I listen and eat.
After 4:00 p.m. – After answering my bosses twelfth simple tech question for the day, I can get back to the busting inbox, finish the first draft of the invitation design and send it for approval, begin drafting the industry wide quarterly newsletter, and add a couple of events to our website.
Oh no, those events have to also be created on Facebook and Google My Business?! And they need different sized images?! Though I have and use Adobe CC for major design projects, for every day needs I love Canva (business is free for nonprofits) because I can create one image and resize it easily for multiple channels.
It’s around this time that I realize I haven’t been a great intern mentor so call him in for his “teachable moment of the day.”
Just as I’m about to head out and beat the worst traffic. my boss calls me in to help him with an email to Board members. While there he asks about the invitation design which he never looked at. To “make my life easier” we go to my office so he can tell me his edits while I’m in the design file.
If I’m not trying to get home in time for my husband to leave for rehearsal (he’s a music director) I will take the time to shutdown my computer and turn off the power strip. Most days I pretend its OK to just leave my iMac on.
I remember to put out the candle and close the windows in my office (WIN), and ignore the emails that are still coming in while I’m in the car. When you have 30+ member theatres offering you free tickets to events, it is easy to fill up the evenings.
But let’s be honest, that is also work and there are only so many shows I can drag my daughter to before she starts to resent it. So tonight, I will stay home and let her take a bath instead of a shower and spend an extra ten minutes singing her lullaby playlist, even though she’s fast asleep.
Now it’s time to tackle the freelance projects…
Thanks for sharing your day, Laurice!
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