Meghan Florian
Here’s the latest installment in our series on the “Day in the Life” of nonprofit communicators, where we ask you to describe your day in your own words.
Meghan Florian earned an MTS from Duke Divinity School and an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. She is a freelance writer and editor, and her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including some you might even have heard of. She has served as the part-time communications coordinator for the Resource Center for Women & Ministry in the South since 2011.
Here is her typical day:
Before 8:00 am: From 7:00 am when I wake up until 8:00 am, I drink coffee and go through my inbox, deleting any junk mail, reading updates from email lists I subscribe to, and skimming the daily NYT headlines.
My goal is to delete everything that will distract me from important messages later (or stress me out because of how full my inbox is!) by sorting through the things that don’t require much brain power while I am still waking up.
8:00 am – 10:00 am: My nonprofit communications job is part time, and I work afternoon hours, so from 8:00 am-noon I attend to my other work as a freelance writer and editor.
10:00 am – 12:00 pm: Since I work for an organization that serves as a resource to women who often work in what I think of as high burnout fields, I try to attend to my own well-being too by not eating lunch at my desk! I take a break to eat, and then I ride my bicycle to the office a few miles away.
12:00 pm – 2:00 pm: The first thing I do when I arrive at the office (usually around 1:00 pm) is check my email for any urgent work related messages.
Then I log in to our Facebook page to check how previously scheduled posts have been doing. Yesterday I posted an update encouraging people to sign up for a writing workshop we’re offering starting next month, so I checked the online sign up page to see if that post had garnered any further interest, and sent a couple of personal messages to supporters of our organization who might have missed the post.
2:00 pm – 4:00 pm: Over the summer we have two lovely interns, so at 2:00 pm I met with them, and the ED, for a staff meeting.
During the school year we don’t have staff meetings, since our staff is so small, so I enjoy this chance to collaborate and work with young women in the summer months. The interns report to us how their projects are going, and I share a little about what my job looks like.
After the staff meeting I edit the verbiage for a monthly newsletter email the director of our Elder Women program sends out. Once I’ve edited the text, I add it to an email message in Constant Contact and send it to a couple of our board members to proofread.
After 4:00 pm: I try to have the more detail oriented parts of my work done by this time (no proofreading after 4:00pm!), so now I make a list of posts to work on for our Tumblr site in the next two weeks, and look over some blogs we follow by other women and organizations in our field, choosing some content to share on our Facebook page and scheduling those posts.
I also look ahead on our calendar to see what events we have coming up that will need email announcements. We do fewer programs over the summer, so there isn’t much on the horizon until fall, so I can breathe a bit of a sigh of relief.
Then I read through the interns’ weekly written reports, which they submitted to both the ED and myself yesterday.
The last thing I do before I leave for the day is check my to do list to make sure everything urgent has been attended to, and to make note of anything I need to prioritize the next day. I try to be out the door and headed home by 5:30 pm.
Want to be featured in this series? Tell us what you do in a typical day as a nonprofit communications pro.
