On the fourth Friday of First Book Fun...

I took a break because it was my birthday today. Yep, so this week First Book saw two of its fellows leaving First Book and of course one of them had to be working in the development department. So basically, our development department is now just me and my supervisor.
I suppose you could say I got tired of waiting around for celebrities' publicist to answer or not answer my emails asking for their clients favorite book from childhood but anyhow, I did indeed take somewhat of a break today after getting everything that I needed to have done for First Book.

However, my office mate, Meghan and I have been getting along really well ever since she arrived and we've dubbed our office the cookie monster world since we both absolutely loved cookies and both sad that now cookie monster has to be known as the fruits and vegetable monster...no more C is for cookie and that's good enough for me from that lovable blue fluff of fur.


So I went and visited the Franciscan monastery for my birthday even though I'm not catholic. (Although my office mate is) and just relaxed and wondered through their gardens


These monks definitely takes good care of their gardens.

On the third Friday of First Book Fun...

We sent off someone who has been with the organization from the very beginning...one of our first employees who Kyle Zimmer was very reluctant to see go. It seems that she had been with the organization for more than a decade and was one of the key players of the organization. It was a major going away party and the people who have been with the organization for awhile now were all very teary eyed.

Going through the files of First Book, it seems that there's a high turnover rate and I wondered back to my experiences of being a tutor and what implications of this is. Of course, First Book does have an institutional memory on its computer drives where transient people like myself can see the history of the organization from the inside out.

Looking back to the previous friday entry, I just realized that I have not explained much about the What Book Got You Hooked? Campaign, essentially the campaign was started three summers ago to engage the donor base, so it was an interactive campaign to try to get the donor involved. So First Book asks the donors what book got them to really enjoy and hooked on reading and the site features the favorite books of celebrities. I believe there are over 80 celebrities featured on the site currently. The campaign's climatic closing inovles people from all 50 united states voting for the state they want to see receiving 50,000 books for the recipient groups in that state.

Voting is suppose to open on July 15th but check on the site to make sure:

http://booksforkids.firstbook.org/whatbook/

On the second Friday of First Book Fun...

I should try embedding my rendition of 12 days of christmas parody song for First Book Fridays in here sometimes as it might spice up my somewhat boring posts to this blog. Anyhow, so another week goes by here and "on the second friday of first book fun I did...*drum roll* two celebrity requests for WBGYH campaign.

People here at First Book really enjoy using abbreviations that confounded me for sometimes until I got the courage to ask, "umm...what does that stand for?" So please excuse me if I use some myself in here. Anyhow, it seems that people also like to be out of the office quite often too as I seem to get a lot of out of office replies from people. So last week after I got myself to be quite familiar with Kintera, the database software that we use, it got somewhat more complicated. Apparently you can analyze the database also on excel and I added another set of skills for looking at large amounts of data and inputting specifications to net myself some interesting database points for trying to figure out which states had top donors.

So it seems that First Book's unique proportion of funding may not be so good in the economy as a majority of funding of the organization comes from corporation and the economy does not seem to be favoring large corporations currently. Thus, in the development ends of things we are looking at how to lure in more individual donors and finding foundation grants, which is what I've been busying myself with this week. In times of a rough economy, it seems the foundations have also been affected somewhat as I'm extremely disspointed by several grants that would have worked out perfectly for First Book but they have discontinued taking in applications, or you would have to know someone on their board to apply or your organization would have be a previous applicant.

In terms of individual donation pleas, we're moving into the territories of social media and I have been included on meetings pertaining to this. As with my previous experience with working on starting non-profits, the power of social media can be a very powerful thing and I think First Book is definitely going in the right direction with placing themselves on twitter.

First weekend in DC :)

Where I took the opportunity to visit a ton of musems, but not the famous Smithosonian ones. I actually went to the

26th Annual
Dupont-Kalorama Museum Walk Weekend

http://dkmuseums.com

I went and rode on the metro and did this for both Saturday and Sunday.

My favorite would definitely have to be the Anderson House, which was built in early 1900s and winter home of Larz Anderson III (1866-1937), an American diplomat, and his wife, Isabel (1876-1948). The house had some very unique combinations of both western and eastern influences as Larz was a diplomat to Japan and actually brought back articles from Japan that were put in the house.


I really wish I read some books on photography when I took these pictures.


I adored the princesses in this painting, which was based on a real coronation event of a russian princess I believe.


You can somewhat see the eastern influences in the Anderson house in this picture of the katana and the Japanese panels.


I went back to the Anderson house and admired the beautiful interior of the house some more.

I also really enjoyed the Phillips collection which had artworks from world famous painters like Degas and Renoir.

This is actually from Jacob Lawrence's migration series about the migration of African Americans from the south to the north from 1916 to 1919.


This was a painting from the group THEY at the Meridian International Center and part of the Metropolis Now exhibitions. They paint pictures of people in various rooms and I haven't figured out the message of this painting yet.


I sort of ran into a political protest near the statue of Ghandi when I was walking over to the Anderson house on Saturday.

First entry for First Book Friday Fun

So this is the first friday that I have been at First Book and it seems to be a off day for most people on my floor. I wonder where everyone have gone to since I'm not seeing a lot of people. Onto my adventures that I've managed to get myself into this week:
So Monday I went into the office and it seems that I have been assigned to the development department and my supervisor would be the director of this department. I'm handed some random task that would get me accquainted with the database software that the organization is using to keep track of donations and donors who register and donate online. The week is filled by meetings with various departments and I learn the ins and outs of how the national organization works. Although the development meetings are composed of people from several different departments including communications, strategic alliances and community outreach.
Mostly I've been updating the database and working on some research for upcoming projects for the summer. The big campaign that I've been helping with is the What Book Got You Hooked? which happens to be the campaign for the summer. So far I've been familiarizing myself with the various deparments that exists within the organization and trying to figure out who is in which department. Trust me, it gets quite confusing. None of the other interns have arrived so I'm in an office by myself until my office mate gets here next Monday.