Marketing with FringeArts

Hi all! I’m Eleanor Sicko, a senior Advertising major concentrating in Media Planning. This past June through October, I had the pleasure of working as a marketing intern with FringeArts, a nonprofit performing arts company based in Old City. Every fall, they host the annual Fringe Festival, which is a city-wide arts festival composed of venues and performances in neighborhoods all across Philly. This year, the organization decided to shift the festival into an almost entirely digital format. The start of my internship focused on preparing for the Fringe Festival, and in September I was able to see the culmination of all the hard work that the company and each of the artists put in over the previous months. 

I interviewed with FringeArts in February of 2020, just a few weeks before COVID shut the world down. I felt so lucky that the internship was still intact and that it could be done remotely, not to mention that FringeArts had the guts to adapt their entire festival to the pandemic while others around the world were postponed or cancelled altogether. It was difficult to adjust to the WFH flow in the beginning, but as the internship went on I became more familiar with how to structure my days and prioritize tasks.

I was able to get such incredible hands-on experience with digital marketing tools that I can now confidently add to my resume. My supervisors gave me invaluable guidance on how to use them, but also encouraged me to try things out on my own and learn how to work with them independently. There were slow days and there were busy and stressful days, but overall there was balance with both the time commitment, as well as what I put in versus what I got out of the internship.