Our team chose to support Feed My Starving Children Charity. This charity’s main purpose is to deliver nutritious meals to starving children around the world. We hosted a series of micro events leading up to and culminating into one larger service. Micro took place throughout the month of July and the service event took place early August.
First micro event consisted of participating in the Rock ‘n’ Roll 5k race (July 18th). The goal of this event was to boost awareness of the charity, show our commitment to the cause, and potentially inspire donations.
Second micro event was a bowling afternoon (July 26th) where profits where proceeds from the night were donated to the charity. This event also served as means to promote charity and event awareness.
Third micro event consisted of a “Dine and Share” night (July 30th) at a local Chick-Fil-A near the location of the service event. A percentage, 15%, of revenues for a designated time period was donated to FMSC on our behalf. This also served as an opportunity to promote our service event and the charity.
Our service event (August 1st) aimed to bring a group of people together to pack food into boxes at a local facility for Feed My Starving Children.
Objective and Success Measures
Our team collectively identified 3 objectives to focus on from start to finish:
- Raise awareness of FMSC (measurable)
- Raise donations for FMSC (measurable)
- Ensure the project is enjoyable and fun (subjective)
To meet the awareness objective and drive donations we created a Facebook page as well as a Twitter page. We were able to promote our events, share updates, and receive comments from our followers. In addition we utilized free of charge online marketing services such as Metromix, Fun in the Burbs, Evently, and Timeout. We also distributed and displayed event flyers in Public libraries and other local businesses.
The following are the results of our success measures we have identified to ensure that our objectives are accomplished:
- Donations: $4,544.20
- Number of unique donors: 33
- Number of people at bowling event: 57
- Number of people at packing event: 50
- Total number of like or followers on Facebook and Twitter: 211
Advice
We have learned from our experience. We strongly recommend the following:
- Assign a Project Manager at the beginning of the project
- Establish a regular schedule and stick with it
- Decide on a method of communication to minimize confusion
Lessons Learned
We have learned from our successes as well as some of the difficulties we experienced throughout the project’s durations. Here are 3 we have all identified to be most important.
- Having a designated, responsible, and dependable Project Manager on the team from beginning to end is crucial. We have identified a member of the team to take the lead at the beginning and it helped tremendously.
- Using web based communication tools was very helpful and it encouraged every member to stay on task and current with responsibilities. It also created transparency, allowing each member to see the status of the project. Some tools used included Trello, Slack, and Google Drive.
- Not having all of the event attendees’ names created confusion. Using Eventbrite to track the number of reservations was very convenient. However, one person was able to reserve more than one spot with one name.