Want a paid internship or casual admin work?

Ok. I am overworked. It’s time to offer a paid internship opportunity or casual admin work to someone keen to learn more about working as an independent producer. If you know someone who’d be keen please share this about!

Who I want

Ideally someone keen on the behind-the-scenes with dreams of producing, OR someone who is self-motivated and may end up as a self-managed indie artist. Good basic skills with WordPress, Photoshop, Word and Excel, an eye for nice design, good at researching and pretty savvy with social media; strong writing skills, happy to work independently. I would be particularly happy for a woman or LGBTQI person because so much of my work is feminist and queer performance, so I’d have more opportunities and contacts to share.

I’m offering $25-40 per hour for half-one day per week for admin and marketing support (rate dependent on experience – interns at the $25 because I don’t think people should have to work for free even when they’re learning / if you’ve graduated and have a bit of marketing and producing experience we can go higher).

My business is growing, I am taking on new projects and events and I am often on tour and need a stand-in producer at Queerstories. If this works out, the role could really grow and involve more responsibility (and income).

Who I am

I am the person in this silly photo of colourful suburban bliss, shot by Patrick Boland when we were meant to be taking new headshots. I am also an independent writer, producer and performer, so you’d be getting a taste of that life – freelance, precarious, fun and challenging. I’ve been building my career in this area for about 8 years, full time freelance for 3 and I’ve produced and performed work at Sydney Festival, the Opera House, Adelaide Fringe, Melbourne Comedy Festival, Perth Fringe, Edinburgh Fringe etc. The work you do won’t be deeply fascinating, but it’ll be a good insight into the admin and marketing efforts that go into maintaining a full time creative career as an independent producer, and I’ll happily offer whatever advice and knowledge I can.

What the work is

For some of this work, I’d want you to work at my place in my home office so someone who can spend some time in Sydney in the next few months would be great. Most of the work can be done remotely as it’s online and involves about half a day to 1 day per week in the coming months.

Queerstories mini marketing project
This is the main project. I need to conduct a mini campaign for the Queerstories podcast in the lead up to the release of a book I have edited due for release August 28 (to be launched at Sydney Opera House on September 2). Workload would include:

  • Researching podcast marketing and avenues for promotion
  • Creating a hit-list of media who cover podcasts in Australia, key journos to approach etc
  • Making little graphics/ memes for each story, using quotes from the stories and photos I’ll supply (basic photoshop) – note that there are over 60 stories, you’d need to listen or read, find good quotes, do the artwork etc
  • Setting up a full facebook ad campaign for the podcast (I can help with strategy on this as I have done a bucketload of facebook advertising and am great at it)
  • Tracking the ads and adjusting budget accordingly, reporting back to me

Website management and other marketing, admin work

  • Regular updates to event calendar on two websites, using WordPress – you’ll check my Facebook events on 3 pages and update the sites
  • Drafting blog and enews content
  • Adding events to event sites online in Sydney and Melbourne, like submitting to Time Out etc
  • Scheduling tweets via Hootsuite to promote events
  • Migrating several albums of photos from one Facebook page to another
  • Basic photoshop to adjust images sizes or update text in posters – as in you don’t need to be a graphic designer but you need to be able to wrangle images and pre-existing designs
  • A bunch of file management on old photos and video files, labeling, ordering etc (the boring bit), storing best ones on Dropbox and saving others to ext hard drives – this would need to be done in Sydney
  • Ad hoc mini-research projects like adding funding or application deadlines to my calendar, looking up festival application forms and drafting in the basics etc
  • Finding contact details for a spreadsheet of cabaret performers and LGBTQI storytellers I keep as a google doc and populating the doc with this useful info

If you’re keen email me a CV and a bit about you to hello@maevemarsden.com