Many of my blogs have been spent discussing my actual work at the Eye Hospital and I have therefore neglected the best part about working at the office…the people who work here! They are quite an eclectic bunch and all have something truly unique to bring to the table. So I thought that I would take a bit of time to tell you a little but more about them….

Nicky is the Head of Fundraising and Marketing here at the Eye Hospital. Well I think ‘Head’ is quite an understatement (perhaps Guru of Fundraising would be more fitting)! It has been amazing to work alongside Nicky because she is absolutely incredible at her job. She somehow finds a balance between being passionate about her job, being generally brilliant at fundraising and lastly (and I think most importantly) she makes the time to listen to and be thoughtful to those around her.

Dominic is the Eye Hospitals Communications and Administration Officer. I think the best way to describe him is Nicky’s right hand man. He is one of the hardest working and most dedicated people I have ever met and is truly enthusiastic about working here. I spoke to him at the beginning of the week and he was telling me that over the weekend he had been thinking about one particular task he had been doing at the Eye Hospital. Well, I think you will join me in taking my hat off to him, as there are not many people who would be thinking about work at the weekend! He is probably one of the nicest people I have ever met and is always chirpy and good for a chat. Also, he is probably one of the biggest coffee and tea drinkers I have ever met too!

Geof is our Trusts and Campaigns Manager. Most of my work here at the office has been under the guidance of Geof. He has given me the responsibility of some interesting and complex projects such as the Adwords campaign. We have been given a charity grant by Google to advertise The Eye Hospital on the Google search engine.  So, I have been working with Geof to construct the format of these campaigns.

Earlier on in the week, we were having a team meeting and we spoke about Geof’s work on the website and on Jerusalem Scene. It really struck me how talented Geof must be in order to create such a professional looking website. Also, he often looks over my blogs before I have pasted them on the wall…and generally he makes sense of my my ramblings! His writing ability with writing and editing Jerusalem Scene goes to show he really is a talented chap!

Faryal is the Fundraising and PR Officer.  I first met Faryal when I was working downstairs at the International Office when she came to chat to me about the work at the Eye Hospital. Even from our first meeting I was struck by how passionate she is about human rights in the Middle East region. Even from our first meeting I remember thinking- gosh she is passionate and bilingual, she really is an employer’s dream! Whenever we strike up a conversation she always has something really interesting to say. We were chatting about human rights yesterday and she was telling me about a piece of research that she was thinking about doing which contrasted the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories to that of the status quo in Australia. When I asked her whether she was thinking about doing a PhD in this interest, she replied ‘no it is out of personal interest.’ Well, I think that is incredibly admirable, that doing this piece of research is out of personal gain as oppose to academic credit. Perhaps a sign of a ‘true academic!’

Lisa is the Administration Executive for the London office.  Most of her work is dealing with the finance side of things here at the Eye Hospital. We were chatting the other day about her career and she has worked in an impressive list of charities. She is such a lovely lady, down to earth and so easy to get on with.

It is funny, because I was thinking to myself, why haven’t I told you a bit more about these people before, but then it struck me that I wouldn’t have been able to give you quite an accurate representation of each person until now. Well that’s all for now ladies and gents….I’ll be back tomorrow for the last hurrah at the office…which will see the return of Nick (previous intern)….

I hope you have all had a relaxing and enjoyable bank holiday!

My time at St John Eye Hospital is really flying by. It was already a week ago that I wrote my last blog and yet it feels like only yesterday.

Last Wednesday and Thursday were mostly spent revamping the Tumblr page. Like I have said before, I have never been particularly up-to-date with technology and so this has been a real learning curve. I am yet to buy an iPod and I was bought a Kindle for my birthday which I am yet to turn on, four months later! So I am really enjoying learning about new technology and – who knows – after this, I might even turn my Kindle on…

I have also spent a bit of time looking into the celebrity ambassador’s project.  The premise of the project is to find a well-known person who could represent the Hospital Group as an ambassador. We hope that this will generate more supporters and followers of our organisation.  When Nick (the previous intern) gave me his hand-over document, I was a little bemused to find that he had been trying to contact Halle Berry. So when I initially looked at this document I merely thought that he had a crush on Halle Berry and for this reason he wanted to contact her. I was also a little amused to find that he had been trying to contact Nick Jonas (The Jonas Brothers).  This is because I knew of Nick’s love of all things Disney (Sorry Nick!) which led him to the Jonas sibling. But as I started my research into likely celebrity ambassadors the penny began to drop. Nick Jonas has ‘type one’ diabetes and Halle Berry has ‘type 2’ diabetes.  Diabetes is important to us because it is pandemic within the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT), with 12 to 15% of the population suffering– three times more than in the West. Complications arising from diabetes can damage the retina and lead to blindness.  Diabetic retinopathy affects up to 80% of all diabetics. It is the main cause of blindness amongst the working age population across the globe.  So it would seem that Nick did have a credible reason for contacting Halle Berry…

With only just over a week until the end of my internship I have begun reflecting on my experience of working in the St John Eye Hospital Office. I feel that I have gained some valuable knowledge working here– such as a broader understanding of the on-going difficulties and the need for medical care in the region. I became interested in charities and the work of non-governmental organisations while I was travelling in southeast Asia before my degree where I was able to gain first-hand experience of the vital importance of these organisations in this region. I took this passionate interest into my degree and wrote my dissertation focussing on the use of food aid as a foreign policy tool.

While I had this basic knowledge and interest I did not know a great deal about the OPT and the work of charities and non-governmental organisations in this area.  From working at the St John of Jerusalem Eye Hospital Group London office I have developed an understanding of the issues in the OPT, and in particular the need for eye care in the region, where the rate of blindness remains ten times higher than in the West.  We need to get busy!

Well that’s all for now folks, until Friday L x

I spent my weekend in Brighton with the girl I used to live with at uni. We filled our time with shopping, eating and generally over-indulging …needless to say my bank balance was looking pretty shabby by the end of the weekend!

It has all been pretty quiet in the office today. Lisa, Faryal and I are in the office and Nicky is off on a mammoth trip to Wales to meet with the new Hospitaller there. This week so far I have been focussing on raising the profile of The Eye Hospital through social media. The members of staff at The Eye Hospital are truly grateful for all the donations they receive from their dedicated supporters. But I hope that the use of social media will help expand this base of loyal supporters and raise awareness of health related issues in this part of the world. So in order to do this I have been maintaining the social media sites as well as building new ones. This has actually been really useful for my own knowledge as I would call myself a born technophobe and this project is forcing me out of obscurity! To disseminate information, I have been using our Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/St-John-of-Jerusalem-Eye-Hospital-Group/241008222591173 and Twitter accounts: http://twitter.com/#!/StJohnEyeHosp I have also been exploring new forms of social media such as Stumbleupon. Probably the best way to describe Stumbleupon is by calling it website bingo. Basically you enter into Stumbleupon your areas of interest and then it randomly churns out websites you might be interested in.  Well after playing a few round of Stumbleupon bingo, I decided that it probably would not be appropriate for our purposes because there is only a small chance someone would ‘stumble upon’ our website. I then re-launched our Tumblr site http://stjohneyehospblog.tumblr.com/ but I am still working on the layout, so I will keep you updated with that. But perhaps the most exciting thing of this week was revamping the WordPress page. It’s all shiny and new and is definitely worth a look! http://stjohneyehospital.wordpress.com/ From this I have also discovered the use of Gravatar which is a new way to display your contact details http://en.gravatar.com/stjohneyehospital .

Well that’s all the techno goodness for now… I’ll be back next Wednesday for a double helping of the life and times of the St John of Jerusalem Eye Hospital office!

L x

It might be because I’m twenty years old that the team here assume I’m achingly hip, in touch with the developing technology of the 21^st Century and generally ‘down’ with this kind of thing. I’m really not- look what I had to put into quotation marks in the last sentence. Philosophy doesn’t prepare you for the latest software innovations. My housemates know I’ve just about mastered the kettle but anything more complex than the oven baffles me and ignites impotent chimp-like rage. Even the oven’s caused me problems. It didn’t occur to me one time that the pizza was better out of its cardboard box when being reheated. Seriously.

Still, blissfully unaware of my technological shortcomings, the team believed I could be the guy to put the charity on Twitter. I guess it’s fair enough when you consider foetuses hurtle of the womb and let the world know on Facebook. So I battled and fumbled with the website, fully expecting it to be an uphill struggle of Sisyphus proportions. Imagine my surprise when it wasn’t too bad. True, so far we’ve caused a ripple on Twitter so small it stretches the definition like a sweater on Katie Price. Then again, three followers isn’t such a bad start for the first day right?

Twitter was one of the jobs I had in the afternoon, though it does seem odd to consider it work. Earlier in the day I was given a great induction of the International Office of St John’s by Gemma from the office below. She didn’t work for the Eye Hospital bit but had more to do with the other parts of the St John’s charity. There are thirty three independent associations of St John’s in places all over the world ranging from Wales to Papua New Guinea. Gemma herself has worked extensively in the Caribbean and many more places besides. It was fantastic to hear about her travels and the real positive differences made. Apparently, there’s another Southampton intern joining her office on Monday so there’s going to be two Soton students runnig amok around the offices at Charterhouse Mews. You’ve got to pity them.

Moving on, I started my great project for the internship today, a marketing strategy for the Hospital. It’s going to be lengthy and look hopefully rather official with graphs and flowcharts and stuff. If I can fit in a pie chart somewhere too that’d be awesome. There was a sweet cartoon in yesterday’s Metro detailing what marketing is all about. Underneath a marketing sign was the slogan ‘Honesty is the next best policy’. Nice. But I’m treating the strategy like I treat any other piece of work from my degree. However, instead of using big words and scattering them about pretending to know what they mean, I’ll be actually using big words and scattering them about knowing what they mean. That’s the plan.

Right, you’ll be glad to hear we’re almost at the end of the daily blog. Last day of my first week tomorrow, with a team meeting to boot, so it’ll be pretty busy. Best prepare now, don’t think I’ll be able to wing it like my semin…nothing else I do in my life. Speak to you soon.

Nick

Today I grappled with the Raiser’s Edge database. Raiser’s Edge is probably the most popular database aimed at serving charities and stores data on pretty much everything to do with fundraising. Dom, kindly and incredibly patiently (almost to a fault-I think soil would have grasped the spreadsheets quicker than me) lead me by the hand into the world of Raiser’s Edge. All of the records of the St. John of Jerusalem Eye Hospital are stored in it so it was pretty crucial to tread carefully. Thankfully, Dom was a good teacher and so, eventually, I was changing records and registering donations like a machine. Albeit a cack-handed, infuriatingly slow one.

The pace did pick up though the more I practised and the software is pretty user-friendly. My degree rarely makes use of databases, or numbers for that matter, but repeated use really hammered home the how’s and where’s and what’s. It felt good to be doing something where the instant benefit to the charity could be seen. As a form of practical production data-entry can rarely be beaten. The only problem is that completing necessary, recurring administrative processes can turn you into a bit of a robot. Or a cricket score-keeper. Both of which I admire but would not necessarily want to become for an extended period of time. Actually a robot would be ridiculously cool. As long as I could fly. With booster jet wings. And thruster rocket legs. Yeah.

But I digress. The practical data entry was to be superbly balanced with some immense political theory. John, our Communications Manager, unleashed an hour long whirlwind explosion of information detailing the fundamentals of political lobbying and the legislative processes of the EU and the UK. My only previous experiences of political theory were ‘The West Wing’ and ‘The Thick of It’ respectively so it was a lot to take in. Oh and, if it counts, a political philosophy module from first year. (Clue: it doesn’t). But John persevered and slowly, like an ice lolly on wallpaper, things began to stick. It was a blitz of words like ‘implementation’, ‘statutory’, ‘the’ etc but John was as clear and concise as these things can be and I am very grateful. On another note, he was an undergrad at Soton- though pints at Jesters were even cheaper when he was there.

Another thing I started today was the noting down of the recommendations for the creation of a fundraising committee. It’s one of a few things I want to bring to my first team meeting on Friday. The team meeting’s held in the rather swish boardroom (where we hosted the sixteen Malaysians yesterday) and involves a teleconference call to the CEO, Rod Bull, and some of the other team members in Jerusalem. I’m looking forward to it and have been practising my ‘business face’ in anticipation. But I’ll bring my recommendations for the fundraising committee as well as some research into the Al Jazeera International Documentary Film Festival and the meeting should prove valuable and successful. Of course, I actually have to finish those two things which is why I’m going to log off now. I’ve learnt not to make rash promises (both with work and other areas of life) so I’ll play it safe. Will see you when I see you.

Nick