Business Internship Experience 2.B: Business Development and Sales of Advertising Services to Nonprofit Executives
Remote / Work-from-Home Position: Flexible Start and End Dates; Full-time and Part-Time Options; Unpaid Internship for Training, Practical Experience, and Process Improvement. Apply now for all start-dates.
About Us: Bashpole Software, Inc. has been in business since 2006 with services such as applied research and development, nonprofit marketing, and data services. Our mission is to develop technology to help the world help itself. Bashpole Software addresses the urgent issue of misinformation, supports nonprofits in accomplishing their advertising goals, and collaborates with the government research and development community for artificial intelligence software. Bashpole has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the sales of services to nonprofits. Bashpole offers professional internship experiences in departments such as Marketing, Business, Software Engineering, Information Technology, Digital Media, Technical Writing, and Human Resources. Check our Careers page for further details: https://bashpolesoftware.com/careers/
Internship Description: No matter what career you go into, knowing how to present yourself and your offering is a valuable skill. In this position, you will not only learn how to perform our sales processes, but you will also come up with ways to improve them and make them more efficient. You’ll be able to speak directly with a wide range of our target customers (non-profit leaders from across a wide variety of good causes), get to know them, and get to know people from several of Bashpole’s teams. You’ll be able to leverage our message templates, call scripts, and meeting outlines, so that you have a strong point to start from. The intellectual challenge will be to figure out how to improve all of these and to test those improvements as we go.
Tasks and Responsibilities:
- Collaborate with other teams to enhance and improve sales policies and procedures
- Learn Bashpole’s sales methodology and process in order to reach out to prospective partners to expand Bsahpole’s services to wider pool of partners
- Prepare and deliver sales presentations to new and existing nonprofits to sell new advertising solutions and to protect and increase existing advertising
- Provide clients with estimates of the costs of advertising services as well as their Return On Investment (ROI), Mission Impact (MI), and Lifetime Value (LTV)
- Locate and contact potential clients to offer advertising services
- Collaborate with other teams to implement and improve our sales process
- Talk directly with nonprofit executives about their financials, operations, programs and activities in formal Q&A sessions
- Learn how to do market, competitor, and ROI analysis for different nonprofits each season
- Participate in a remote-work environment, learning how to manage a diverse workforce
- Build a strong connections with other interns and staff people through networking meetings while remaining socially distanced
- Attend regular meetings to prevent isolation and facilitate collaboration
Note: This is by no means an exhaustive list but it gives an indication of the many projects taking place. You might focus on some of these to the exclusion of others. Tasks will change according to business needs.
Resume Accomplishments: After completing this internship, here are the top accomplishments that you may be able to add to your resume:
- Designed and proposed effective solutions that led to enhancement of non-profit visibility and engagement, and accordingly social impact
- Increased Bashpole’s pool of clients through reaching out to plenty of prospective partners
- Increased the revenue of Bashpole through implementing and improving Bashpole’s sales process
- Participated in and expanded the training that will benefit future interns
Skills to Have and Develop for this Internship:
- Rapport-building: High networking skills through communication and presenting reports to nonprofit executives
- Consultative Sales: Facilitating open dialogue to identify and provide solutions to a customer’s needs
- Presentations: Delivering effective and engaging presentations to a variety of audiences
- Market Research: The ability of an individual to successfully collect and analyze valuable information regarding the needs of nonprofits
- Reading and Writing Comprehension: Excellent oral and written communication skills in work related documents
- Organization and Coordination: Staying focused on different tasks, and using time, energy, strength, mental capacity, physical space, etc. effectively and efficiently in order to achieve the desired outcome
- Service Orientation: Deepening a genuine interest in the nonprofit consulting sector
- Telecommuting: Working remotely in both a team and individually
- Communication: Connecting with both your coworkers and current as well as prospective clients with a positive personality, analytical mindset, and sense of humor
- Critical and Creative Thinking: Challenging your own assumptions and contributing new ideas
Technical Tools
- Experience with Google Suite, including Google Sheets
- Message Templates
- Proposal Templates
- Marketing Automation
Minimum Education and Experience: Applicants need to be enrolled in an eligible college or graduate program at the beginning of their internship. Previous internship experience is beneficial but not required.
Apply to One Position and One Experience, 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 you are 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.
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. See more at bashpolesoftware.com/careers.
Frequently Asked Questions about our Internships:
Who are the people that are more likely to succeed in this internship position?
- People who have a genuine interest in the nonprofit consulting sector as well as deep interest in their your field
- They like to get their voices heard and are proactive enough to speak up
- They take notes always and in great details
- They are able to set a schedule and stick to it
Why Intern at Bashpole Software?
- Real Hands-on Experience: 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 career.
- Portfolio: With approval from management, this internship also offers opportunities for you to add examples 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 almost always 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.
What is the expected time commitment? We offer both part and full-time internships. Full-time is required in the summer but available throughout the year. 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 (up to 20 hours a week) lasts up to 6 months, which works out to approximately the same total time commitment either way. You are able to switch from full-time to part-time, or vice versa, as long as the duration adds up to a total of about 60 work days or 480 work hours.
What does a typical week look like?
- 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 typically have from 10 to 20 years or more of relevant work experience
- In addition to this, you’ll have intern-only meetings for collaborating with your peers, reviewing each other’s work, and answering each others’ questions
- Every other week, we will have a “Rule of Thumb” meeting to offer our advice about corporate culture and communications soft skills: these are mostly from lessons that we learned the ‘hard way’ in the workplace, things that no one taught us in college classes but that most employers expect you to know
- You’ll choose hours to work by yourself by putting them on a calendar that you’ll share with your colleagues; the times of day and days of week will be flexible
Can I Join More than One Team? Not in parallel; you could only participate in one team at a time. However, we welcome and encourage sequential internships, meaning participating in one team at one time and then another team at another time.
What are the 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.
What were the Testimonials of our Previous Interns? Check testimonials of our previous interns on our Careers page: https://bashpolesoftware.com/careers/
What are the requirements/ expectations for this internship?
- 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
Why is it an 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. 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. There are no fees or expenses for participating in our internships. Bashpole Software, Inc. complies with all US Department of Labor Federal Internship Guidelines. https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm