Project Update

It's been a few days since my last post, so I figured it was time for an update.

First, a quick update on the RA position/UN project:

Housing: We have to move apartments. I'm not even going to get into the argument. I don't agree with their reasoning (there seems to be a trend here) but its not even worth it at this point. We're hoping for 2 spaces to be available in Spinner, but if not Amanda and I will have to move into separate apartments. Meeting with housing again tomorrow morning to figure things out more. I just want everything over with so I can focus on my online classes, the project, and my life, basically. This whole ordeal has consumed it for the past two weeks or so. It's been a long battle, and I'm just done fighting it. If anything, it's just made me lose any desire to work for them in the future.

But, on to more positive? note: the UN Project

Research is coming along, slowly but surely. We've struggled the first few days, I believe in part because we didn't really have a direction. We were dropped into this without knowing what to do, and it took us a few days to "Get accustomed" to everything I guess. The only analogy I can come up with is in Castaway, where Tom Hanks first washes up on the island. He just sits there, unsure of what to do. He mentally takes in his surroundings, and simply sits there and thinks. Finally he gets some direction and begins to take steps to survive.

Today was especially good, we all felt extremely productive and felt like we made some strides towards making a plan for the next few weeks. It's been great working together as a team for most of the time, we really utilize each other- talk things through out loud, bounce ideas around, and find new things or topics to research through each other's research.

We've also spent a good amount of time discussing the marketing around this project. We know that we want to make others aware of it, as it's a big project for Champlain College. Not only should others in the college know about it, but the community as well. But, here lies the problem--how do we do that? How to we make others aware of it? Especially in the next few weeks, as we want others to be able to follow us while we're in Africa. So far, we've turned to one marketing method we know and trust-Facebook. We created a group in order for everyone to join- group members, friends, family, etc... Here, we'll use this as a way to update our research findings, marketing strategies, etc... to keep everyone updated. Also, we've listed some student blogs and encouraged others to do it as well. This way they are all in one convenient place and others can access various student blogs in one place. On the flip side, once we gather a great deal of students, it will be easy to reach them all if we need to by simply sending a message to all the members in the group. In addition, we're hoping the more people we reach out to, the more will come back with information links, contact names, etc... that they know of. Yay for social networking!

Another issue we've come across in our our discussions is a lack of a "brand" I guess you could call it? We want to give the project a name and a logo, something that will not only unite everyone working on the project (there seems to be some division lines between groups) but will also give something for others to connect to, not just the "EMC UN Project". As marketing majors, we all got excited about this topic and have developed a few ideas for names, t-shirt and logo ideas, as well as empowering quotes and slogans. Of course, this isn't all up to us, so we're excited to bring this to the group meeting and get feedback from the two design teams as well. But, some of the questions I've been wrestling with--is this something that the students and community will be excited about? Is this a cause they'll deem worthy of supporting? If not, is there a way we can change that? And, do they believe the project has as much magnitude as we do? I guess these are just questions we'll have to work on finding the answers to over the next few months.

Either way, we want to not only make a change to the communities in South Africa, but we think its equally as important to reach out to the community around us, even if only to educate them on the severity of this issue. We have to be careful though, and not focus too much on this issue just yet. I think sometimes its easier to work on marketing for this because it's familiar, its the world that we live in. But, with only a few short weeks before the trip, we need to really focus our attention on gathering the right research and preparing for the research we need to collect while over there. Not only is this research going to be vital towards the project, but we only have one shot (10 days) at everything. There is no room for error, really.

So, our goals for the next few weeks are going to be to really figure out the target market and narrow it down as much as possible. The more specific the target market, the better results we'll have, hopefully. We also need to create surveys, determine the areas that we want to visit to observe behavior and have focus groups, along with which we'll need good, quality interview questions. On top of that, we need to collect as much general research as we can to be able to develop a detailed profile of the target market before we go so that we can have something together for others to read on the plane.

We have a lot of work ahead of us and sometimes we feel a little in over our heads, but I'm confident we have a great team and great advisers such as Meg Frenzen and Elaine Young that are helping to steer us in the right directions.

Overall, with each day that goes by and the more information I learn, I feel more committed and passionate about this project. I only hope we'll be able to inspire others in the same way.

I leave you with a quote that I found earlier, and I thought it was relevant to the project and a great possible slogan for our group. It was said by Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist and leader of the African National Congress:

"Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world."