Interview 1: Austin Remington

Austin Remington is Chess4Life's Assistant Marketing person. His job entails graphic design and promotional duties, both things I've studied in the COMM program and that I would consider doing in the future.

April Newsletter Published

The April newsletter has been published and can be found here!
http://chess4life.com/About/News/
This month I wrote the State Tournament article, the chess puzzle, and the Nationals Team advertisement. Writing the tournament article was easily the biggest challenge, as it required me to visit the tournament in downtown Seattle , talk to parents and students, get information on the winners, and of course write the darned thing.
Writing the chess puzzle entailed tracking down a chess coach, talking about the game for a bit, and coming up with a puzzle that beginners could complete, experienced kids might need to contemplate for a minute or two, and finally that parents and students could work on together.
The Nationals ad was basically a rehash of last month's ad with a bit of revised verbage to add some urgency to the situation.

Oh look here's that article I talked about last week.

Excitement buzzed in the air as hundreds of students and families flooded to downtown Seattle for the 2014 Washington State Elementary Championships. The tournament was held on the Seattle waterfront in Smith Cove Cruise Terminal, a two story building with 145,000 square feet of space. In addition to players and their families, numerous chess related organizations showed up and gave support for the event including Pico Dragons, Chessplayer.com, ChessSport.com, and Chess4Life.

Over 200 Chess4Life students participated, most of them placing in their grade sections against peers from all across the state. A few students placed particularly well including Aaron Barnhart (Kindergarten, 5^th place), Kimberly Ong (Kindergarten, 8^th place), Winson Wan (Kindergarten, 9^th place), Rushaan Mahajan (First Grade 4^th place), Miles Kuipers (First Grade, 3^rd place), Tarik Kameric (Second Grade, 1^st place), Ethan Pogrebinsky (Second Grade, 3^rd place) Brandon Peng (Second Grade, 6^th place), Idan Uritzky (second grade, 9^th place), Alec Beck (Third Grade, 1^st place) Tendo Lumala (Third Grade, 7^th place), Isaac Zhang (Third Grade, 10^th place), Neil Chowdhury (Fourth Grade, 1^st place), Everett Wang (Fourth Grade, 2^nd place), Richard Yang (Fifth Grade, 2^nd place), Anata Ranganathan (Fifth Grade, 5^th place) Freya Gulamali (Fifth Grade, 8^th place), Patrick Peng (Fifth Grade 10^th place), and Lorenzo Patton Jr. (Sixth Grade, 7^th place).

While many students showed up to compete, some were happy just to participate and learn. “I’m proud of my son for being here,” said one Chess4Life father, waiting on the upper floor for his son to finish a game below, ”It takes guts to participate in something this big, with such great young chess players!” The mood on the playing floor reflected the old adage ‘win, draw, learn,’ as every child came off the floor with smiles on their faces, regardless of game results.

“My first game went really well,” said Bellevue student Eashver Elango with a huge grin, “even though I lost my second game.”

Other students also expressed enthusiasm with their results. “I’ve won both of my games so far!” said Kevin Yang, “and I plan to keep on winning!”

In addition to sponsoring the event, Chess4Life helped staff the parking lot, event floor, and featured two booths by the doors to help welcome visitors on the way in. In addition the company provided a shuttling service for Chess4Life students and parents, sparing them the walk from the distant parking lot to the event center.

With the rousing success Chess4Life students were met with this year, it’s exciting to see how well our Nationals team in May will do in in Dallas, Texas!

State Qualifier Tournament

On Saturday, Washington had its biggest state qualifier chess tournament of the year. Elementary students from all over the state attended and played, and I was, naturally, there to learn what I could and report on it. I spent about six hours at the tournament, and saw several kids I knew from Chess4Life. Within' a day or two I am to write a 600-ish word article on the event for publication in the next newsletter. Should be fun!

Trello: The coolest thing to happen to group organization

Ben and I started using Trello (www.trello.com) to organize our work on the Newsletter. Would heartily recommend it. It allows you to create virtual "cards" with tasks written on them which are separated into three categories on a "board." Any number of people can be added to a board, and move task cards to the "not yet complete," "in progress," and "completed" categories.
Use of the website has made communication much simpler, and the ability to set deadlines on cards has helped with prioritization. The website's iPhone app uses push notifications to remind users when due dates draw near, making it very hard to forget things.

I'm gonna have to keep using this thing after I graduate.

Increasing responsibilities and a sample screenshot

As my ability to write and design the chess4life newsletters grows, so to do my responsibilities. Instead of merely writing articles, I'm now in charge of tracking down other coaches and employees to help with the writing duties, giving me the opportunity to outsource the Featured School articles.

We were able to find a few people willing to do this, and already stepped up and gave them responsibilities to keep them busy until June. Here's a screenshot of the emails we send to subscribers by the way, they look a bit different than the version on the website.

Sure has been a while since I posted here!

Since my last post, I've published two newsletters for Chess4Life. In order to finish my tasks I've had to drive around town gathering information on company events, interview prominent figures from both inside and outside the company, speak with students for our featured student of the month column, and of course write articles based on the information I glean.
So far we've consistently featured one student of the month, and a chess puzzle, and a school spotlight focusing on one of the schools chess4life visits to offer chess lessons and seminars for students to attend. Links to all past newsletters can be found here.
Not featured on that page, however, are the emails I send to subscribers using iContact, a mass emailing program required a bit of skill with both word processing and graphic design to utilize. I'll include a screen shot of that in my next post.