Brief description of the project: 

The purpose of this project was to organize and execute a fundraising event that would support the mission of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. The event focused on raising money and awareness through a community-based fitness challenge at the Ray and Meyer Fitness Center at DePaul University. This challenge would have people jump vertically and see how high they could jump, and it was a small-dollar entry for jumps, which would be donated to St Jude.

Brief Description of the charity: 

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is a children’s treatment and research hospital that is dedicated to finding cures and preventing diseases in children, primarily pediatric cancers and blood disorders. One of the great things about St. Jude is that families never receive a bill from St Jude for treatment. 

Factual Analysis of success in terms of project objectives:

We set out to raise a goal of $250, and we ended up raising nearly double that, finishing off at $420. So, financially, we crushed our goal. We also achieved a lot of the goals that we set out to do, which was to secure a location for our event to take place, which ended up being the fitness center. We also created flyers and utilized various platforms online to promote our fundraiser, which is how we landed the majority of our donations. And then just keeping track of everything making sure we all stayed on top of things we were responsible for, which we did a good job for the most part.

Lessons Learned: 

We had two big lessons that we learned, one of them was implementing some type of prize of some kind. We had discussions as a group about having a raffle of some kind that people could enter if they chose to attend our event to win a prize, which we were thinking would be Cubs tickets. Unfortunately, that decision was made a little too late, and we believed that if we had some type of prize, even if it was not the Cubs tickets, some sort of raffle prize would have likely gotten more jumpers, and led to us raising a lot more money. And the other thing that we learned was probably to delegate the right work to the right people.

Advice for teams doing similar projects: 

The best advice that we would give to teams doing similar projects is to get a prize. It will generate your team a lot more donations. And then coming up with a plan as quick as possible, so you can start getting things in line, and that way you can also be prepared if you need to pivot.

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