Workout From Home (WoFH) For Youth Service – Group 1

Project Description: 

We planned a series of virtual fitness events over the course of a week.  Fitness instructors lead either a strength training class, yoga, or cardo dance class over Zoom. The classes were free to bring awareness to our charity organization. We asked for donations to support our charity organization.  

The classes took place on August 9, 2020 through August 17, 2020. 

Charity Information 

Youth Services of Glenview/Northbrook.

A non-profit focused on providing mental health, crisis intervention, and family support services to children in the Chicagoland area.   

Mission: “ to ensure that every child grows up happy, healthy, and hopeful with a vision to be the center of collaborative social-emotional support for children and youth. Most important, Youth Services is proud to have the most generous sliding scale program in the area and many of our programs are offered free-of-charge. No family is ever turned away based on ability to pay.” 

 Website: https://www.ysgn.org/ 

Project Successes 

The project will be judged based on completeness and how successful we were in raising donations: 

Target:

  • Virtual Fitness Class Participation: 50
  • Donation to the Youth Service of Glenview (before the company match): $1,000

Actual:

  • Virtual Fitness Class Participation: 44
  • Donation to the Youth Service of Glenview (before the company match): $1,235

Lessons Learned 

  1. Better communication with stakeholders would make things easier 
  2. Limit project team size, larger teams tend to have time management issues 
  3. Contingency Plans are very important, we quickly needed to pivot when one of the classes was cancelled due to a power outage 
  4. Challenges of planning a virtual event, without being able to meet in person it required additional attention to communicating and tracking project objectives 
  5. Capturing meeting notes with actions items to keep everyone aligned, our first couple meetings were missing this, and it caused a little confusion 
  6. Technology and weather conditions can adversely impact virtual events so we should have a way of communicating to attendees in advance 
  7. Encourage volunteers to commit weeks before the event rather than waiting until the last minute, as we ran into some lastminute scrambles to confirm attendance 
  8. Limiting scope changes, aligning to a simple scope ahead of time makes things easier when complications arise 

Advice for Future Teams 

When hosting virtual events, it is important to start by building a team with different skillsets so that you can tap into each team member where they can contribute to the success of the project.  The teams should start the project planning early in the project. This will help keep you ahead and give you the agility to make changes. Having a well thought out project plan, a detailed risk/issues document will help the team plan well even as uncertainties come up.  Engaging all the key stakeholders (organization members, volunteers, team members, professor, etc..) is key. It is better to over communicate when planning a project than to miss critical items that needed to be completed. When picking an event to host, teams should conduct a survey to gauge people’s interest especially when you are in unprecedented times. Understand the need and respond by offering an event where you will see higher interest and participation. Having a contingency plan for every documented risk to the project will keep it from becoming an issue.  

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