Group #1: Document 8 – Project Audit
Brief Description:
Our team held an in-person fundraising event and online fundraising campaign to support the Wounded Warrior Project.
The in-person fundraising event was a trivia night at Hawkeye’s Bar & Grille located in Chicago’s Near West Side. The trivia night was held on November 9th, 2023 from 5 pm to 8 pm, with the trivia game starting at 6:30 pm. The event had 8 teams comprising of 32 people who participated in trivia. During the event, we had a cash donation jar that collected $107. The event generated approximately $800 dollars in sales for Hawkeye’s, which resulted in an $80 profit sharing donation to Wounded Warrior Project from Hawkeye’s. The online fundraising campaign was set up directly on the Wounded Warrior Project website and went live on October 17th, 2023. The online campaign had 23 donations totaling $933. The total funds raised from the event and campaign were $1,120.
Factual Analysis of Success:
Our team decided on five measures of success for the project; number of social media impressions, number of trivia night attendees, fundraising goal, project management skills learned, and amount of fun our team had.
| Fundraising Categories | $ goal | $ collected |
| $ donated at the event | $400 | $107 |
| $ donated online | $400 | $933 |
| $ matched by venue | 10% of total sales from Trivia Night event | $80 |
| $ from Trivia ($25 entry fee per team) | $100 | 8 teams X $25 = $200 |
| Total: | $1000 | $1120 |
| Awareness Categories | goal | actual |
| Number of Trivia Night Attendees | 50 | 32 |
| Social Media Impressions (Likes, Shares, Comments) | 50 | 21 |
We met three out of the five success measures, for that reason our team has deemed our project a success. The two success measures we did not meet were social media impressions and number of event attendees. Our goal for social media impressions goal was 50 impressions, we only garnered 21 impressions on our posting and sharing of the trivia night’s Facebook event. For trivia night attendees we wanted to have 40 people attend, but only had 32 attend. The three success measures we did meet were our fundraising goal, project management skills learned, and amount of fun our team had. Our fundraising goal was $1,000, which we surpassed by $120. We measured the amount of project management skills learned by a simple rating system. At our first team meeting each team member rated how much they knew about project management on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being very unfamiliar and 10 being very familiar. This same question was then asked at our final team meeting. The team average was 4.2 in the beginning, and at the end it had increased to 6.4. The amount of fun the team had was determined in a similar manner using the simple question of “did you have fun?” It was a unanimous yes response from the team.
Description of the Charity:
The Wounded Warrior Project serves veterans who incurred a physical or mental injury or wound during or after service. They improve the lives of our veterans and their families through their programs in mental health, career counseling, and long-term rehabilitative care.
Lessons Learned:
- Understand expectations for your event from the perspective of the participants. Trivia is most often free to enter and typically does not require entrants to sign up prior to the event. Implementing a pre-event sign-up sheet will likely just lead to anxiety around the potential turnout and might derail other aspects of the project, falsely identifying low turnout as a priority to fix.
- Risk analysis and management makes the project run much smoother. Taking the time to analyze the risks associated with your project and how to address them made our event much easier. While it’s impossible to be prepared for EVERYTHING, having a safety net of preparation reduces anxiety and pays off in the end.
Advice for future teams:
Create a shared calendar for the group to keep track of deadlines, meetings, and time when team members are unavailable! It is also very beneficial to create a group chat as soon as the project kicks off to allow for constant communication and readily available team members. Try a cadence for scheduling recurring meetings, as ad-hoc meetings can be helpful but can be misunderstood for start times and not all members could attend. Most importantly, try to meet with your team members in person before the event, as you can create a sense of trust sooner.
Photos of the Event:
