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Business Development Season 1.A: Interview Nonprofit Executives for Customer Discovery and Pre-Sales Activities

Remote / Work-from-Home Position: Flexible Start and End Dates, Full-Time and Part-Time Options, Unpaid Internship 

Why Intern at Bashpole Software? Rather than the coffee-fetching of a typical internship, Bashpole Software, Inc. provides interns with hands-on experience as we develop a first-of-its-kind system to help non-profits gain the publicity that is currently more desperately needed than ever. Bashpole Software, Inc. enables you to learn from machine learning, machine vision, natural language processing, software development, IT, marketing, management, HR, and technical writing professionals. 

Your training and participation in our research and development can directly help nonprofits around the world to connect with donors, volunteers, employees, constituents, and more. In volunteering here, you can help nonprofits help the world on a larger scale than by interning for any one nonprofit. Join us in the pursuit of truth, knowledge, and how best to help the world make itself a better place.

Thoughtful Mentorship: Bashpole Software, Inc. enables you to work in small teams of typically 3 to 5 interns. You’ll meet regularly with fellow interns on your team. You’ll also meet weekly as a team to gain direct supervision and mentorship from the company’s CEO, senior staff members, and/or more seasoned interns.

Time Requirement: all of our internships have start-time flexibility, where you can start at whatever season of the year that’s most convenient for you. Generally, a full-time internship (40 hours a week) lasts for 3 to 4 months, and a part-time internship (18+ hours a week) lasts for 5 to 6 months. It is preferred — but not required — that interns start ASAP and continue to the end of the school term for each season.

Timeline: “seasons” are a unique part of the Bashpole Software internship experience. A “season” generally means one of summer, fall/winter, or winter/spring. It varies depending on the timeline (semesters/trimesters/quarters) your college follows, and internship start and end dates vary likewise. Each season holds a different set of responsibilities, as linked below. You can request to begin a season at any time of year.

Preferred Skills to Have and Develop for this Position:
  • Write and speak to nonprofit executives
  • Schedule, conduct, and follow-up on interviews as primary research in a prompt and reliable fashion 
  • Deepen a genuine interest in the nonprofit sector and discover better ways that organizations can communicate with the public
  • Work remotely in both a team and individually 
  • Connect with both your coworkers and interview subjects with a positive personality and sense of humor
  • Challenge your own assumptions and think creatively

Responsibilities for this Position:
  • Learn a methodology for uncovering challenges that a potential market experiences and does not yet have a good solution for
  • Conduct informational interviews with non-profit leaders to learn how fundraising and publicity practices change over time
  • Work on RoI analysis for different nonprofits each season
  • Participate in a remote-learning environment, assisting nonprofits during the COVID pandemic with advertising their causes
  • Build a strong network with other interns while socially distanced
  • choose their own nonprofits, allowing for flexibility in their scheduling and decision-making
  • Attend regular meetings to prevent isolation and facilitate regular collaboration

Related Positions:

Join for More than One Season: applicants can apply to skip Season 1 if they already have an exceptional background However, interns wanting to move to Season 3 must have done a Season 2 internship in advance. Internship participation over multiple seasons is preferred, but not required.

Apply to One Season, Only: do not apply for more than one internship position at a time. Pick the one that interests you the most, apply for it, and then if invited for an interview, you may indicate interest in other positions at that time. Once we have been able to answer your questions, you can request to apply for a different position for the remainder of the interview.

Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose: this is not a “basics” nor an “introductory” internship. Applicants are expected to have already taken a majority of university classes that are relevant to their internship position. The purpose of this internship is to bridge the gap between university learning and workplace application. 

We support creating opportunities for leadership. As an intern, you’ll be encouraged to lead projects and goals that suit your interests. This encouragement extends to potential management training.
  • You will work either collaboratively in a team or independently on a project of your choice from a list that we will provide.
  • In weekly team meetings, you will be guided by Bashpole employees who have from 10 to 20 years or more of relevant work experience.
  • We aim to perfect skills and hone in on the application of those skills. Therefore, we expect interns to bring in unique skills in addition to learning new things. 
  • Think of it in comparison to school classes: in academic settings, you’re assigned a bunch of small tasks that are due at a certain point, and then are typically forgotten about. However, for this internship you will aim to master skills in the way one would with karate or music. Thus, interns will be trained by being given long-term projects to perfect the details of processes and products.
  • You will contribute to the training of future interns, including mentoring your peers and expanding our training materials based on your experience.

Challenges to Expect: this internship is going to take hard work and sometimes will be an imperfect experiment in training. There may be occasional communication at odd hours due to time differences and urgent matters. There will be more intern-intern interaction than with employees, and you can expect a mix of training from supervisors and finding and developing training yourself. Tasks may be vague and unclear at times as some assignments will be new. However, we believe interns grow by dealing with such challenges and working through them: this is how the real world works. Our organization is run by real people — and while we are not perfect — our intentions are to work hard and be the best we can be. We look for interns that have the humility to admit the same about themselves.

Network with Peers, Mentors, & More: Bashpole supports networking opportunities by helping you to learn how to effectively communicate with executives. This will allow them to build lasting impressions and have direct interactions with staff members and fellow interns around the United States and the world. Interns often report connecting with more people in our remote internships than they do in physical classrooms of comparable size because of the ways we encourage and facilitate networking meetings.

Portfolio: With approval from management, this internship also offers opportunities for you to add examples of your work to your professional portfolio, which you can later use for future job applications.

Credit: If you want work-study or school credit for the internship, we can provide the kind of oversight your university would require. Some educational institutions require prior approval before the start of an internship. It is your responsibility to check with your institution to be sure you meet all requirements before you accept a position.

Workplace Readiness Training: There are a variety of corporate culture and communication soft skills that many organizations expect you to know, but few universities or companies actually provide training for workplace proficiency. As a result of this, we’ve developed something unique: our rules-of-thumb (RoT’s) training process. The RoT’s’ are the otherwise unwritten rules of professional etiquette straight from hard-learned experiences of industry professionals. We’re developing a book and a training system for explicitly teaching this kind of advice to our employees, interns, and eventually to others that will be valuable for their future careers.

Company Culture: Bashpole believes it’s crucial for interns to feel comfortable speaking up for what they believe in. We value suggestions for improvements on all aspects of our company and voicing opinions about projects in team settings. We also want interns with the ability to pursue the career growth that they want and the courage to request the kind of work that they want to do. Bashpole looks for intellectually honest individuals with a spirit of independence and interdependence.

Testimonials: Bashpole’s company culture is a supportive, motivated, and collaborative environment for all levels of employment that isn’t based upon strict workplace hierarchies. With the projects you work on, and the people you regularly work with, you can establish a cooperative and productive relationship with anyone at any place on the corporate ladder.

Make a Difference: unlike classroom experiences, your training here will be with real projects. This allows you to have a larger impact than if you were to volunteer with a single nonprofit or government organization alone.

Internship Parameters:
  • Be generally available for meetings during business hours – we have team and individual meetings every week via Google Meet and similar online conferencing software
  • Flexible daily start and stop times 
  • For internships taken during the fall or spring, work on average 4 hours a day or 18+ hours per week. For internships during the summer, work on an average of 8 hours a day or 40 hours per week
  • Bashpole expects interns to manage their individual schedules
  • Internship begin and end dates are flexible according to your university’s calendar for classes

Non-Discrimination Policy: All nonprofits we serve are required to be compliant with Google’s non-discrimination policies, meaning that Bashpole works with a diverse set of nonprofits such as nonprofits working with crime to mental health issues to combatting misinformation. Thus, Bashpole interns are expected to be non-discriminatory themselves and help us serve any nonprofit that fits the eligibility guidelines.

Unpaid Internship: Bashpole is a for-profit company that’s rebooting itself, which explains the start-up-like environment. Due to these circumstances, we currently don’t provide compensation. However, we always support and encourage interns to reach out to their universities to apply for school credit or scholarships that some universities offer to students to help them cover living expenses when they take unpaid internships. There are no fees or expenses for participating in our internships. In lieu of payment, we provide interns with rich experiences such as receiving mentorship, the responsibility to create training, strong recommendation letters based on performance, and the opportunity to graduate to advanced management-based seasons. 

Bashpole Software, Inc. complies with all US Department of Labor Federal Internship Guidelines. https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm