For the first time this year, the Footprint Academy took place online. Over the course of a week, we learned about five different, yet equally important aspects of digital marketing, ranging from paid search to project management. In groups of four, we dealt with live clients and proposed strategies to help them optimise their online presence.
Personally, I was partnered with Bailey, Helena, and Kaya, all of whom had either just started at Footprint or would do so in the coming months. Our team name was The Bomb.Com, which no one except for us thought was particularly clever! We made up for our lack of creativity in nomenclature by putting all our effort into working on Footprint’s own site, though, analysing which areas could be improved with what we’d learned about, and how to best go about those improvements.
We started the week off with a day focused on auditing and business goals – meeting our client for the first time and asking them a list of important business questions that would inform the rest of the week. Then we worked through SEO, Paid Search, and CRO doing lots of practical activities and working in our groups to develop ideas that we would feed back to our client at the end of the week. On Friday, Hannah and Rosie took us through project management techniques before we finished our presentations, then it was time to present to our clients!
After an intense week of studying, we finally got to meet the team in person on a foraging trip at the beginning of June. We were all so excited to see each other in the flesh and have a fun day picking our own food and getting to know each other.
After foraging and enjoying a delicious meal cooked with the herbs we’d gathered, it was time to celebrate our graduation from the Footprint Academy. Because of COVID, many of us hadn’t even been able to properly celebrate getting our university degree, let alone completing the Academy, so a ceremony was much needed.
Armed with just three or four sheets of paper and some feathers, we were able to create our very own, personalised graduation caps. This was a real challenge for some of us – myself included – whereas others went the extra mile and created unique pieces, like Helena’s Viking helmet. Ultimately, we all managed to produce something we could fit on our heads and throw into the air to celebrate completing one chapter of our lives and entering the next. We can’t wait to see what working at Footprint brings our way this year!
– Jennifer Ammann, Content Administrator
