Covid Interns saving businesses from the commercial challenges of COVID-19

Covid Interns is a not for profit, that aims to connect small Irish businesses facing the commercial challenges of Covid-19, with volunteer university students and graduates who can help.

Covid Interns was set up by Paddy Ryder and Rob Muldowney, two recent graduates from Global Business at Trinity. Since launching, Andrew Kilgallen, a recent Economics and Finance graduate from UCD has also joined the team to help scale.

It is aimed at both university students and Irish SMEs, as the organisation matches students with businesses based on their skills, interests, and time commitments.

The team has leveraged their connections within Irish universities, establishing partnerships with societies in universities across Ireland creating a pipeline of talent.

To date, students have signed up from NUIG, UCD, Trinity, UCC, UL, TUD, and Maynooth. In addition, there have been sign-ups from over twenty UK universities including Imperial, LSE, Cambridge, Warwick, Edinburgh, and UCL.

These students come from a range of disciplines meaning that placements have come from a variety of different roles such as digital marketing, financial planning, search engine optimisation, business development, marketing, sales and social media management, among others.

Initially, there was a particular emphasis on partnering tech-savvy students with digital marketing skills into Irish businesses.

However, social distancing regulation has dried up traditional revenue streams and driven business from physical channels to online.

This means it is now imperative to have a strong e-commerce and social media presence, however, often these non-core activities have been underutilized.

However, since launching, the role of Covid Interns is to engage with a variety of businesses including family businesses, charities, tech start-ups, and social enterprises.

The interns are keen to help businesses work on those longer-term strategic projects, as it also affords them an opportunity to develop their own skills as they seek employment down the line.

The prospect of taking on a skilled volunteer to complete these lurking tasks is very attractive, both from potential results and cost perspective.

With Covid Interns, a business can get access to new skills and do so for absolutely free.

This relies on proactive and empathetic volunteers, who just want to help small businesses weather the storm, lending their expertise.

The volunteers want to make lasting differences in their communities by helping local businesses navigate Covid-19, and gain valuable work experience along the way.

If you are a small business manager looking for an additional set of hands or wish to find out more please visit www.covidinterns.com, email [email protected].

More about Irish Tech News and Business Showcase here.

FYI the ROI for you is => Irish Tech News now gets over 1.5 million monthly views, and up to 900k monthly unique visitors, from over 160 countries. We have over 860,000 relevant followers on Twitter on our various accounts & were recently described as Ireland’s leading online tech news site and Ireland’s answer to TechCrunch, so we can offer you a good audience!

Since introducing desktop notifications a short time ago, which notify readers directly in their browser of new articles being published, over 50,000 people have now signed up to receive them ensuring they are instantly kept up to date on all our latest content. Desktop notifications offer a unique method of serving content directly to verified readers and bypass the issue of content getting lost in people’s crowded news feeds.

Drop us a line if you want to be featured, guest post, suggest a possible interview or just let us know what you would like to see more of in our future articles. We’re always open to new and interesting suggestions for informative and different articles. Contact us, by email, twitter or whatever social media works for you and hopefully, we can share your story too and reach our global audience. We are agile, responsive, quick and talented, we look forward to working with you!

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at [email protected] or on Twitter: @SimonCocking