Black Girl MATHgic
From January to May 2020, I worked part-time as a general business intern at Black Girl MATHgic, the first and only math subscription box curated for young Black girls. The purpose of the box is to increase math confidence and decrease math anxiety on a 3rd-8th grade math skill level.
I primarily worked with Brittany Rhodes, the founder, and Yoluanda Brown. As a general intern, I wore many hats, from website analytics to content creation.
Table of Contents
Website Analytics
When I came on the team, Google Analytics was set up for the website, but it wasn’t being monitored yet. I quickly self-taught the basics of Analytics and got to work. The team also used WooCommerce which gave some analytics of its own.
The team wanted an easy-to-read spreadsheet that listed important monthly data. Other than that, it was my discretion on how to organize the sheet and what numbers to include. I aggregated the data I found in WooCommerce and Google Analytics and tracked the following:
- Channel breakdown (where users came from, e.g. direct, email, etc.)
- Top 10 most viewed pages
- Time, bounce rate on key pages (shop, cart, checkout)
- Top events (“viewed product”, “started checkout”, etc.) by category (checkout, subscriptions, etc.)
- Top products/subscriptions sold, including graphs of net sales per month
For 2 months before I joined, there was an issue with Analytics and it did not get any metrics from the site. It was frustrating to see inaccurate data on the sheet, but we made sure to keep that in mind when looking at the metrics.
Documentation
At the end of my internship, I created a concise document giving an overview of Google Analytics and how to update the tracker sheets to make it easier for my team to continue after I left.
Website Contributions
Mathematician Hall of Fame
One of the goals of BGM is to inspire math confidence among young Black girls. As such, every monthly subscription box included a featured Black women who uses math in her everyday life. As time passed, we featured many people, and we decided we wanted to compile them on a page in our site called the Mathematician Hall of Fame, which includes engineers, professors, program managers, and more.
Some months, we had extra stock. In the future, there’s the possibility of listing those extras in the shop and linking them to their corresponding featured mathematician.
In the Press
Previously, there were multiple Google Doc listing all the times we were featured in an article or podcast. I compiled them into a pretty In the Press page. I enjoyed playing in Wordpress and Elementor for these two pages.
Other Duties
Social Media
The team brought someone else to take care of content ideas, but I created graphics for the BGM Instagram. We already had templates and a branding kit, but I also liked tweaking the small things to make it look as nice as possible.
Sample Posts
Administrative Work
Since the team was so small, I wanted to help out as much as I could. No task was too small — in fact, the first thing I did was overhaul organizing all the Canva graphics into neat folders.
Key Takeaways
I feel honored to be chosen by the BGM team and contribute to the cause. I actually had applied to a different position (writing the solutions manual to each month’s workbook), but that went understandably to an experienced teacher. The intern role was created for me because they wanted to bring me on, so I felt even more motivated to contribute as much as possible. I truly learned a lot about the backend of a WOC-led e-commerce business. My team members experienced many life events (from natural disasters to giving birth), but they consistenly showed up – talk about resilience!
Tools Used
- Asana
- Canva
- Google Analytics
- Google Suite
- Trello
- Wordpress (Elementor, WooCommerce)
- Zoom