I work at a university and they have a scheme where they offer one-month placements to their former graduates who are struggling to find their first job. A friend of mine works at the Careers dept which administers the scheme and as a favour (and because I thought having some line management experience would be good for my CV) I agreed to 'host' a placement.

I'm the marketing and partnerships manager at a business-facing department of the university. One facet of my job is essentially to generate a pipeline of companies to come and collaborate on research projects with our academics.

What do you think would be suitable tasks for me to give to the intern next week?

I have a mailing list on MailChimp which isn't segmented and sometimes has some key information missing e.g. where a company is located, region-wise. There's also no information on the database about companies' sector. One task I thought of was to ask the intern to make sure all the data is up to date, with regards to region etc. That is, to get the company information from the email address of the business contact and then edit the entry on MailChimp. In the same vein, I've began creating some groups for the 'industry' that each company is in. I was thinking of asking the intern to go through the entries and add each one to a relevant industry group. This will allow me to sent targeted campaigns to the mailing list. For example, if we have a particular academic looking for an industry partner in the agri-tech sector, I could send a campaign to only agri-tech companies.

I appreciate that this will be a fairly mundane task for the poor intern but it's important work and will help us a lot.

Is there another task or project that comes to mind that would be good? I was thinking of asking the intern to compile a prospects database of his/her own accord (I'll brief them about the types of companies we want to be talking to of course) but this will require a fair bit of initiative and I don't know much about the adeptness of the individual yet. Are there any databases or portals that you'd recommend that would be a good place to start for an endeavour?

The projects needn't be solely MailChimp or email marketing based of course, but at the same time the placement is only a month and I don't have loads and loads of time to train them up.

Thanks a lot in advance.

Data gathering is what imediately popped into my head. That will probably fill up their whole month. If they perform well, or you take a liking to them, then giving them a task with more agency would be appropriate. Allowing them to gather prospects from manta, buzzfile, cortera, and etc seems like a good idea.

not being trivializing but seriously you should just google "marketing intern job descriptions" and borrow from that as a starting point. from there you can adjust or input any real specifics relating to your company (i.e. managing MailChimp versus managing mail list.) Other than that, try to think about what you'll get the most use out of and how it relates to (presumably) the core lessons they learned in their program (which for marketing is at the very list the four Ps - product, price, place, promotion.) maybe have them do competitive research into your market and see how others in your space operate. for the right intern style candidate I find the better/more capable ones tend to come to you with ideas on how to get the most out of their position. So be flexible to some extent and receptive to ideas the person brings to you as the first few weeks get underway.

FWIW interns in general are hit or miss; and not knowing anything else about these candidates you could expect that given they aren't finding success with placement it could be due to a lack of verifiable skills. With that in mind, I'd keep your expectations on the low end.

I have trained marketing interns and junior/medior marketeers.

You can ask the intern to work on the e-mail strategy with the goal of improving the conversion of your e-mail campaign (I'm assuming you have a conversion goal).

Tasks:
- Optimize the content, design and call to action of the letter
- Optimize the scheduling of e-mails
- Making sure you collect data (opened e-mails, website visits, conversions etc.)
- A/B test e-mail campaigns
- Implement retargeting cookies to advertise with a display ads
- Research competitors by signing up for their newsletters

Depending on the intern, it might be a bit too much to expect. He/she will needs the ability to learn easily and figure things out.

Do you get to select the intern with an interview?

By the way, 1 month is really nothing. If the intern does not pick up things quickly, expect to spend a lot of time on supervising. In that case it's best to give simple tasks.

have him mine linkedin.