NORTHERN MICHIGAN — The Northern Lakes Economic Alliance has an opportunity for students and recent graduates to run a social media marketing project aimed at attracting young professionals to live and work in Northern Michigan.

The organization is seeking three to four paid interns for a multimedia campaign where they will interview professionals, businesses, entrepreneurs and more about why they live in Northern Michigan.

“This is a very collaborative internship between the interns and the staff (who) will be overseeing them, where we recognize that these students are studying in this field and are going to have insights based on their age and their academic experience, of where this project should go,” NLEA Strategic Initiatives Manager Sam Bailey said.

“So we're very open to working with the students to build the project in a way that is going to be beneficial for them and beneficial for NLEA, but also that's going to support the region as a whole.”

The goal of the project is to bring in interns in the 18 to 30 age bracket who have expertise in social media, marketing, storytelling and multimedia content creation who can appeal to their peers by capturing “the cool factor” of the region. NLEA is hoping by sharing the stories of young adults living and working in Northern Michigan, more will be encouraged to set down roots in the area.

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“We have a talent shortage in a lot of different sectors and as much as hospitality, tourism, things like that are an important part of our economy, they're not necessarily the base underpinnings of a lot of our Northern Michigan economy,” NLEA President Dave Emmel said.

“Those jobs in manufacturing and health care and more of those professional-level jobs are what we call more family-sustaining jobs for our region. And so this is part of a more comprehensive approach to starting to understand how we attract and retain talent and specifically focus on a demographic of individuals in that 18 to 30 plus year age group.”

While Emmet, Charlevoix, Cheboygan and Antrim counties have seen some population growth in recent years, with the largest increase happening in 2020, the region’s population is still aging. As more residents retire and retirees move to the area, strain is added to the medical system and the service industry, but not enough working-age people are in the region to support it.

Outside of the service industry, the region's growing manufacturing and industrial sector has an increased need for workers that is not being filled by the 65+ population.

“If you look at the demographics, public school enrollments in our region are at a 20-year low and they've been declining every year. So we know that birth rates aren't growing, our younger population isn't growing,” Emmel said.

“We are an area that tends to have historically, in the last couple of decades, attracted a lot of retirees. So, one of the challenges we have is that those people aren't filling the jobs available in our region. And so we need to figure out a way to attract talent here to fill a lot of those jobs that we have.”

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NLEA has had interns in previous years and usually selects a different project each year for them to work on. This year, the interns will be working as a team to find stories of young professionals, businesses and events in Northern Michigan and tell them in written formats, photo, video and other presentations. According to Emmel and Bailey, the project will have opportunities for creative freedom and allow the interns to have some control over the content produced.

Part of the project will be developing a social media structure that can continue after the internship is completed.

An ad seeking interns states, “The 2023 intern project will focus on developing social media content and strategy to target young adults (18- to 30-years-old) and market the region’s economic, cultural and natural assets.”

“We've focused on individuals that have a background in marketing, communications, public relations, social media, digital storytelling, videography, those types of things. We want to make this a positive experience for the individual, as well as  help them build their portfolio work. It is intended to ultimately result in higher levels of employability for those individuals,” Emmel said.

More information is available on the NLEA website. Applicants may send a resume and cover letter to Sam Bailey at sam@northernlakes.net. The NLEA Summer Intern Program is supported by the DTE Energy Foundation.

— Contact reporter Tess Ware at tware@petoskeynews.com. Follow her on Twitter at @Tess_Petoskey.

This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: NLEA seeks interns for social media project promoting Northern Michigan