For my internship, I worked with the local fraction of CDA Amstelveen. The main focus of my internship was to update their website, set up their social media accounts, run said accounts and also film and edit introductory videos of the members of the party, for the national election last March.
My favourite part of the internship was writing, filming and editing the videos for the election. I was inspired by the 73 question videos made by Vogue and thought it would be a fun concept to give the videos a more dynamic feel. I picked the questions myself and made sure to set up questions in a way that highlighted the standpoints of the CDA, while also playing into the current trend of personalization of politicians in the media.
Link to one of the videos (in Dutch) included here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev7HD3oZkLY
During this internship, I also learned to work with TypO3. This proved to be difficult in the beginning, as the software was not very user-friendly. After meeting with other interns from other fractions, I got the hang of it and updated the home page, the personal websites of each member and also added the youtube videos to the home page.
This internship was also a great networking opportunity. I chose this organization because I was interested in the political working environment and during my time at the organization, I met many people working at different levels within the political environment.
As a social media intern, I was also in contact with the other people at the party that handled the marketing aspect of the campaign. This put me in contact with Blauw, a communication bureau.
While generating content for the Instagram page, I also worked alongside Dick Aanen. He’s a journalist and partymember of CDA Amstelveen. When choosing this bachelor, I always had aspirations of becoming a journalist, so working alongside him was both very educational and quite fun as well.
As my own political opinions do not always overlap entirely with those of the CDA, it was interesting to work with the party as an opportunity to broaden my horizons. It is also good to put aside one’s judgements, especially in the polarized political climate we are experiencing today.
I think overall this internship, besides the hard skills of coding and editing, taught me a lot about networking and being open-minded when it comes to differing political views (as in the end, each political party wants what is best for their citizens).
I would like to thank CDA Amstelveen for being so welcoming during my internship and giving me so much freedom and responsibility during my time there.