When I plan events, it’s always more fun if it is planned for a good cause. There is something to be said for doing an event with the purpose to help another. With this intern event, Barnardos was our charity partner.  Barnardos mission is to challenge and support families, communities, society and government to make Ireland the best place in the world to be a child.

To help this intern charity event come together we received sponsorship from The Church, Jameson and Shamrocker Tours. The Church allowed us to invade their club downstairs while providing us with welcome food and a free glass of wine or beer.  Shamrocker donated a trip for three days around Ireland, a chance for an intern to see other parts of the country. Jameson graciously donated several bottles of their famous whiskey, along with a lunch for four, and an 18 year old bottle all for us to raffle off; along with providing our guest speakers a bottle of their gold whiskey.
Our speakers for the night were Orla Tighe and Neil Leyden.

Orla Tighe is the fundraising manager for Barnardos. She told a moving story about a little boy she had met that is in programs at Barnardos, she talked to the struggles that he has in his life and how Barnardos helped this boy and his family move towards a better life.

Neil Leyden is the project manager at Gateway Ireland. He spoke to what Gateway Ireland is striving to do. They are focusing on promoting Ireland to the world and harnessing the vast majority of people in the world with an Irish connection. He focused on people with an Irish connection around the world and how they can bring these people together for a common purpose through various social media outlets.

The event all in all was a success; we talked, mingled, danced, enjoyed ourselves, and most of all did it for a great cause. We learned about the cause and we learned about how vast the Irish culture is spread no matter where you are in the world.

We would like to give a big thank you to all of our sponsors and our speakers for coming out last night. It was a great time and we could not have done it without you.

And thanks also to Jason Roe from BTW who kindly helped us raise more money for Barnardos at his event also in The Church.  Their collection brought in approx €250 which is brilliant for a meetup and much appreciated by us and Barnardos.

There are many intern groups here in Dublin this summer and the interns here at Connector have been hard at work planning an intern event for all them. We wanted to create a night that brought everyone together, is fun, educational, and for a good cause.  Check it out here on Facebook.

The intern event will be benefitting the not-for-profit Barnardos, a local Dublin charity that serves the people of Dublin. The event will be on July 28^th from 6pm – 10pm at The Church. There is a suggested donation of €4 and every cent will go towards Barnardos. The Church has kindly donated a free welcome drink and finger food to all the interns that come and show their support for Barbardos.

We will also have several speakers for the night; a representative from Barnardos to talk about the work that they do, Bobby Kerr an entrepreneur that started the largest coffee company in Ireland, and Neil Leyden from the exciting new Irish global marketing project called Gateway Ireland.

We will be raffling off great prizes as well, including but not limited to a great 3 day trip around Ireland courtesy of Shamrocker Irish Adventures, 1 Bottle of Premium 18 year old Jameson Whiskey and much more!  We hope to see all the interns that are here in Dublin out for this special night of fun, community, and excitement.

You will receive a raffle ticket for every €3 donation or two raffle tickets for €5.

Andrew and Shelsea will be the MCs of the event for the evening and can’t wait to see you all there.

The design work I have done for Connector has been an interesting experience. I am caught between the styles and branding that was developed for Connector and my own design and style.  In my design work I like to keep things clean and simple, because I think that is the most effective type of design. Simple design allows for the strongest creativity and at the same time allows for a very straightforward clean message. I guess that’s my design weak point. I need to start developing more complex and interesting design, so that way I have a lot in my design arsenal to use.

Every time I go into creating a design for Conor, I try and do two or three different designs. The first I try to create something consistent with the Connector’s current style. The second I make something I like and I think is cool, and third I make a hybrid of the design I like and the design consistent with the brand. It’s hard at times to create something I like. Time constraints often leave me feeling like there is something left to be desired out of some of my designs. I guess college has spoiled me with a plethora of time to create and refine my designs. Now I am working under short deadlines and desire for high quality. It’s been a bit of an adjustment to this kind of working environment, but I am getting used to it and I am learning where I to focus to save time but still produce decent quality.

Overall the adjustment to office life has been good and interesting. I am still getting used to the fact that my designs are actually being used for the web, proposals, etc instead of for just portfolio development. I hope by the end of this internship I will be doing work on a fast paced basis, I will be able to create a piece that is high in quality but only takes a short amount of time.

Here are a few examples of the work I have created for Connector. Please share what you think about them. Any feed back I can get would be great!

Connector has two interns working with them from the States this summer. Shelsea and Andrew have joined the team last week and will be with us for six weeks. They have come through EUSA, a not-for-profit internship organization that every summer brings 300 interns to Dublin so they get work experience in Irish companies.

Here it is some more background about Shelsea & Andrew:

Shelsea Rawson is currently attending Seattle University as a junior and a strategic communications major. She is very interested in non-profit event planning and social media. She is involved in on-campus activities such as Dance Marathon, a 16 hour event benefitting Seattle Children’s Hospital; not only did she help start the project but also was internal co-director for the 2009 marathon. Other campus organizations that Shelsea has been involved with include the Orientation Advisor program and the Student Events and Activates Council, where she brought bands to campus bi-monthly for students to enjoy for free. Shelsea is also a supervisor at the Connolly Center and works in the Student Activities Office as an information assistant.

Outside school, Shelsea likes to volunteer her time to others and was recently involved with Neighborhood House, a non-profit organization in Seattle. Her most recent project was the organization’s annual breakfast event, which will house more than 800 people at the Seattle Convention Center.
In her spare time, Shelsea enjoys being outdoors and spending time with loved ones. If she ever gets a free moment, Shelsea can be found enjoying herself on a hike or somewhere near the water. She loves to travel and is currently on a nine month traveling adventure through Europe and Central America.

Andrew Sides is currently a Graphic Design major at American University in Washington, DC.  He was born and raised in Saint Louis, Missouri where his family still resides. Andrew is very involved in his community service fraternity at AU, Alpha Phi Omega. From 2009 to 2010 Andrew was the Membership Vice President for the fraternity and will continue to be heavily involved into his senior year.

Andrew’s major is also his passion. He loves to work on graphic design and spends most of his free time learning, researching and creating graphic design work. He was the web intern for the women’s pro soccer team in DC in 2009. He tries to integrate his passion with his work as often as he can. He loves soccer so mixing his internship with graphic design was a unique opportunity.

In his spare time Andrew follows the United States national team and attends matches as often as he can. He also enjoys traveling, music, video games and movies. His long term goals are to become a packaging designer, branding designer, or a movie poster designer, or maybe all three. He is currently in Dublin working with Connector and has really enjoyed the time he has spent here thus far.

This week I connected with a bunch of great people and somethat I have not mentioned yet are here for you to check out.  The first photos is the Flavour of Italy team in Pinocchios Ranelagh who treated me to a fantastic Italian meal while we chatted about their great Italian food and travel businesses … grazie! ciao! grazie!

Then I was interviewed by Sheena O’Dowd & Damien O’Ceallaigh as part of their Masters project in New Media in DCU.  And finally at the bottom, I was at the Media 2020 conference at Croke Park where my housemate Ronan Higgins had his head beamed onto the big screen while answering questions about mobile apps.  Coincidentally, speaking about mobiles, apologies for the grainy photos which are a bit iPixelated.

Lots of new connections and lots of new ideas cos you can’t beat having your finger of the pulse! ;-0

Connector showcased its new training courses and connecting philosophy at this year’s Entrepreneur Event, Friday 23^rd to Saturday 24^th April.

Connector’s team helped man the stand for the weekend, making loads of new connections and spreading knowledge of the 10 C’s.

A huge part of the show this year were the bright and lively discussions that took place in the “Think Tank” and “Invest Test”  auditoriums which Conor helped chair as well as take part in.

One of the highlights of the show was hearing some of the Irish and UK dragons take part in these discussions. The connector team also had the pleasure of meeting Sean Gallagher who had his photo taken with them at the Connector stand.

Connector’s bright and inviting stand design, along with its engaging video content was down to the planning and hard work of new recruit David Dungan who has taken to his role with enthusiasm and gusto, as well as Sarai Fernández hard work managing the connector team and Connector’s Entrepeneur Networking Event at Lillies on Friday night.

Overall it was a busy but rewarding weekend at the stand for the Connector team and it will be a busy week again following the amount of interest shown at the show.

Connector college brought together speakers from Google, Microsoft, Careers Coach and Connector. The event for students took place at the Science Gallery and was themed around ‘I have my qualification, now what?’. It had some great insights for students in attendance on how to brand yourself, networking and job application techniques.

To organise the event, Connector collaborated with DCU masters student Roisin Lyons. Roisin did a really great job in organising the venue, bringing together our speakers and publicizing the event. Well done and thanks Roisin!

Bryna McCool works as a Senior Recruiter at Microsoft Ireland. She began proceedings and spoke about the process of graduate Recruitment. She continued on with some great interview tips before handing over to Careers Coach, Greg Fry.

Greg set up Careers Coach in March 2009 with the aim of assisting people with their Career Transition. He focused on using social media to build your personal brand, and urged attendees to bring these connections offline also.

Lindsay Brown continued the evening. Lindsay is a Recruiting Specialist. She recently moved to an in-house recruitment role with Google, having previously worked on the agency side. She gave great advice to students on dealing with recruitment agencies, techniques used by recruiters, networking and personal branding. Check out Lindsay ’s great blog.

Conor Lynch rounded up proceedings and had a few hard acts to follow!  Conor capped off the evening with some good advice for students and information about how Connector gives students a chance to get great work experience and make connections . We collaberate with students, graduates & interns to run events, marketing campaigns and much more.

The ‘Career Connections’ event helped Roisin Lyons gain valuable project management experience, improve her personal brand and make some great connections. If any students would like further information about joining the Connector Team, don’t hesitate to contact conor [at] connector dot ie

Connector has organised a very special event ‘Career Connections’ on Tuesday 20th April @ the Science Gallery, Trinity College.

Students and graduates are facing an uphill struggle to find a job these days.Sadly, Connector cant help you all ‘connect with a job’, but we do have the connections to help you get ahead of the pack in the hunt for a job.

This promises to be a great night, showing students how to pursue careers in the competitive job market.

Speakers include Bryna McCool: Senior Recruiter at Microsoft HR Ireland, Lindsay Browning: recruitment specialist at Google and expert careers coach: Greg Fry. Conor Lynch, the founder of Connector will also be along to talk about the use of social media to market yourself to employers.

Focusing on the theme ’you have the qualifications…now what?’ Connector wants to give students the best chance to land a job when they get out of college.

The event kicks off at 7 with doors open at 6.45. The event will conclude with some networking and a chance to meet the speakers.

Remember to bring your student cards, as this is a student only Connector event.

Check out the presentation below and register on our Facebook page to attend.

Rosin Lyons, DCU

Connector has gathered together a diverse group of people keen to learn the basics of social media marketing and how to get the most of it.  Today Connector is running its first training course, called “Introduction to Social Media Marketing” at Cassidy’s Hotel in Dublin 1.

We are looking at the Connector blog,  Conor’s Facebook profile, the Connector Facebook Fan Page, and friends of the Facebook Group; Conor’s LinkedIn profile, where we joined the Connector LinkedIn Group, Connector Twitter and Wordpress.

Two of the attendees, Nessa O’Hara and David Curry, were the lucky winners of 2 free seats. Connector is still giving your the opportunity to win 2 free seats in the next 3 courses which are being held in April. To find out more about the contest, click here.

Are you interested in Digital Media, Social Media, PR, Marketing, or Event Management? Would you like to gain work experience?

Connector is looking for volunteers willing to gain work experience contributing to Connector.ie content and assist in our offline events.

The areas of activity would be digital and social media marketing, blogging, digital video/ web TV production, contact database and eCRM management, PR and advertising, mobile marketing, sponsorships, attending events, networking & administration.

So if you have excellent communication skills, have  IT skills & experience using the Microsoft Office suite, the ability to work in a team environment, good attention to detail & accuracy and enthusiasm in emerging technologies, send a cover letter and CV to conor@connector.ie.

You can get more info about Connector Campus, which shows the work we have done up to now within the colleges.