Cassandra Pasker

Responsibilities

As an Events intern, I mostly work on the events that are put on by the Chamber. Two of those are Ankeny Celebrates Education, where we put on a big event with tons of prizes for a raffle to show our support to the educators in Ankeny. The second event is Ankeny SummerFest which has live music, a carnival, vendors with and without food, a free event called Family Fun day, and many more activities. I also help with all the marketing that comes along with the events, especially before the Communications Intern was hired. Some of the things that I have done for that is make up flyers for the events spreading the word and general information, emailing with sponsors and making sure they all have the information they need, and making banners and signs for the events.

Accomplishments

So far in my internship, my greatest accomplishment would be helping to put on the first event I was at the Chamber for. It was Ankeny Celebrates Education, which is an event to celebrate the educators in Ankeny. We had to purchase a lot of prizes which were mostly purchased from member businesses so that we could give back to our members. There was also a lot of day-of setup. But I am also looking forward to our biggest event, Ankeny SummerFest which I have my own event, Family Fun Day, to put on and run. It is July 10th so hopefully it goes well!

Learning experience

Some of the greatest lessons I have learned from my experiences is how important the pre-work is when it comes to events. It helps immensely having everything organized to a T and everything planned out prior to the week of so that you can do very last minute items the week-of and have everything good to go day-of. Another one is making sure you keep track of all your documents and items for the events. The previous events director did not keep a lot of the information organized, or just didn’t have it in the drive at all, which makes it hard when we have new people to plan these events.

What advice would you give?

I think a piece of advise i would give future students is to be detail oriented and to keep track of all your information. Like I said before, it’s important to keep the information from each event. It helps a lot for future years when you go to plan the event again to have all the stuff from previous years easily accessible.