Lessons Learned in Theater Prove Valuable to United Nations Online Volunteering Specialist

ENTRY LEVEL

Jayne Cravens

Age: 36

Current job: Online volunteering specialist, United Nations Volunteers Program, Bonn

First job: Publicity intern, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Williamstown, Mass.

I always thought I’d grow up to be a writer, but just as I was about to graduate from Western Kentucky University with a major in journalism and a double minor in theater and history, a professor sat me down and said, “You know, Jayne, you’re going to have to decide what you want to do, and you don’t seem happy with the newspaper business.” He was right: I’d worked my way through college at several local newspaper jobs, and I didn’t like how competitive that world was. Although I’d never actually studied with this professor, he’d noticed my interest in theater and suggested I might want to go into public relations in that field. “That way,” he said, “you would be writing about what you love.”

It’s funny, I’d never really talked to this teacher before that conversation, and I’ve barely talked to him since, but that brief encounter was like a highly effective, 10-minute mentoring. He really nailed it.

I got a publicity department internship in 1988 with a professional theater in the Massachusetts Berkshires. Williamstown Theatre Festival was like summer camp for stars. We’d be sitting there in shorts and T-shirts stuffing envelopes, and Sigourney Weaver or Marisa Tomei would come traipsing into the office to say hi. In that respect it was a fun atmosphere, but the hours were unspeakably long and we worked under constant deadline pressure. We did 30 productions in two and a half months. It was an unpaid position, and I had to cover my own housing and food expenses. A lot of people today won’t do an unpaid internship, but I think that’s short-sighted. That first position led to a second job — a permanent, paying position with the Hartford Stage Company in Hartford, Conn. — and two years later, I went back to Williamstown as their publicity director. The on-the-job training I received in those two places is the foundation of all of my current strengths as a professional, working as an online volunteering specialist for the United Nations Volunteers Program.

Theater companies have technical needs, production schedules, and deadlines that most computer programmers and other tech types would find impossible to believe. And yet theater companies don’t miss those production deadlines. “The show must go on” isn’t a cliché — it’s an absolute rule. In Hartford, we did one production where we had a swimming pool on stage that didn’t come out until the second half, and we had to fly three actors on wires through the house. We made it happen every night for a month and a half. So you can see why I just have to laugh when I hear Web designers talk about needing six months to prepare for a soft launch.

The theater experience made me devoted to deadlines, often to the dismay of the people I work with. But I also tend to have more realistic deadlines than others. A computer consultant will offer me an estimated date of completion, and I usually extend that deadline but let them know it absolutely must be adhered to.

Theater also taught me about the need to present a polished product to your audience. Producers don’t always get the show up as originally conceived on opening night, but no matter what, there’ll be a quality show for the audience to enjoy when curtain time arrives. I saw a production once where the management had to come out on stage and tell the audience that none of the light cues were working. They kept the bright house lights on, the actors compensated as necessary, and the audience saw a good show and got their money’s worth.

That is how the Web should be. Nobody should ever see the cracks and the missed cues. There’s really no reason for a Web site to run banners that say, “We’re down for maintenance” or “Pardon our dust.” At my current job with the United Nations Volunteers Program, I am helping various nongovernmental organizations build and expand their online volunteering component. About two months ago, we did a live Webcast for government agencies and NGO’s in various cities around the world, with guests in each location speaking about the importance of using information and communications technologies to benefit development efforts in “information poor” countries. Everybody laughed at me, but I insisted on having a backup taped program in case the live feeds went down. Guess what? They went down in Jordan and Seattle, and we used the backup in those places.

Another important thing that theater taught me was a focus on customer service. The person answering the phone is often the only firsthand contact an audience member is going to have with a theater; they expect the quality of delivery to be the same as what they get when they come to a show. Working with the box-office staff, the ushers, the cleaning guy, and the intermission bartenders taught me more about customer service and integrated systems management than any university course.

That reminds me of one last point. My early job experiences, both positive and negative, taught me to value those people in entry-level jobs. As the only publicity intern at Williamstown during my first summer there, I was miserably overworked. When I came back as publicity director, I made sure to hire three interns to do the job I used to do alone, and I made sure they got out of work every night by 8 o’clock. I treated them the way I wished they’d treated me — I got them to learn from each other, to work in a group, to negotiate among themselves for shift coverage. By showing me how not to treat entry-level workers, my own bad experience as an intern made me into a better manager.

— As told to Sandy Asirvatham

How did your first job in the nonprofit world influence your current career? Tell us about it at entrylevel@philanthropy.com