Justin Kocher
By Zoë Eitel
When Justin Kocher was looking for internships to pursue, a Handshake listing for Joel Hall Dancers & Center caught his eye. Justin had never worked with a nonprofit before and the organization aligned with his personal goal of working to support and celebrate local organizations.
Justin made sure to follow up with someone from JHDC to make sure they knew how passionate he was about the opportunity at the local Black-led dance center.
“As a first generation Filipino, diversity is incredibly important to me and I knew that this internship would allow me to celebrate the importance of representation in all of its forms,” he says.
Because of this, Justin was able to meet with the artistic director over Zoom and share with her the many ideas he had for how to use JHDC’s more than 45 years of content for new social media marketing during the pandemic.
After being offered the internship, Justin’s responsibilities at JHDC included creating social media and email marketing campaigns as well as creating virtual showcases of previous performances that sought to emulate live performances.
Marketing & Media Intern at Joel Hall Dancers & Center
BSB Digital Marketing 2020
“Before the pandemic, the majority of their marketing strategies were centralized around in-person shows and events,” he says. “With that not being a viable option, the main objective of my online marketing campaigns was to maintain and boost organic customer/donor engagement with the JHDC brand.”
With marketing campaigns, Justin says it’s important to have a clear objective otherwise it’s easy to lose sight of the end goal and be swayed by gut feelings rather than data and analytics.
“At DePaul, I learned how important it was to utilize data, where to find it, and how to build relevant reports with that knowledge, JHDC and my internship experience offered a real-life application of these ideas.”
“Through this internship I really got to see a real-life application as to how important data is when discussing next steps and ideas for the next project,” Justin says. “At DePaul, I learned how important it was to utilize data, where to find it, and how to build relevant reports with that knowledge, JHDC and my internship experience offered a real-life application of these ideas.”
Working for a nonprofit allowed Justin to see how reliant organizations are on organic and owned media due to smaller budgets. Because there was little to no money to go towards advertising and marketing campaigns, Justin had to find other ways to push the virtual shows to a new audience, like having people affiliated with the center post about them to their personal networks.
“While I am incredibly thankful to see firsthand what working at a non-profit organization was like, I believe working at a marketing agency would be a better fit for me as I would have access to a budget that would open up niche, unique opportunities for online campaigns,” he says.
Justin’s internship was unpaid, so he was able to apply for and receive the Career Center’s Internship Plus Award to support him financially.
“I applied for the Internship Plus program solely because it opened my options as to what I was able to apply for,” Justin says. “I am incredibly thankful for this program as it helped me feel more secure in my decision to intern at JHDC, allowing me to work with such a wonderful team and company without the worry of being compensated.”
