Final blog: reflection of success & process

Our outreach project has come to an end and now it is time to reflect on the overall success of it. In general, I think that as a class of 10^th grade students, we did a really good job. We were given a brief task and together, with very little help from adults we had to organize and communicate and work out our problems. One thing that I think was outstanding that we accomplished was reaching our goal of $500. Our goal was $500 and that’s how much we ended up rising including the money from the shirts, collection money from lunches and the money that was collected from the bag sale (catalog). As a class I think that we could make some HUGE improvement for next time. For example we should use our communication skills better and elect a few people to be a group leader to help us stay on task and get organized so we can use as much time as possible. I also think that the groups that were chosen to get specific tasks were not picked correctly, there wasn’t a mixture of people who worked and who didn’t, and unfortunately, the people who didn’t do much work were all in a group, there for the work that was assigned to that group never got done or was done very poorly and this set us back greatly. As an individual I think I did a pretty good job at doing the tasks that I was given, I sold more than enough shirts and told people about the cause and how they could help. Our main goal was to spread awareness and that’s what I tried to strive to achieve and I honestly think I did it pretty well. There were a few things that I would change about what I did. I think if I were to redo this project that I would handout more flyers and EXPLAIN to people about the cause and the Sieranni family rather than just telling them what the money was going to. I think the easiest part about this project was raising the money, the hardest was raising awareness. I feel like no matter how much to tell people about your cause they just kind of tune you out and nod till your done talking about it. I think maybe next time we could spread awareness in a fun way so people really listen to what you are saying. Overall I learned that, although things may not go the way planned, it is important to learn to deal with the problems with you face and remember why you are doing the task in the first place, to help a family who is less fortunate then yourself. 

Final Week

This was our last week to raise any money and spread any awareness. Overall I think that our class did a fair job at succeeding at this task, some better than others. We had allot of obstacles that had towe had to overcome but so does every task that is given. Our communications skills haven't gotten any better, if anything they gave gotten worse, Individually, I have been selling the T-shirts that we have ordered as a class, I sold them to about 4 people, and this helped to spread awareness. Tomorrow is the day planned to wear the shirt and I think that it will go over well for the people who purchased the T-shirts. Some of the people in our class did not purchase a T-shirt and really should since it is their own project and their own cause that they are supporting, how do you expect others to support the cause if you don't support it yourself? I don't think that we will end up selling all of the shits that we bought, but we figured it was better to have an over stock on them then to run out. I feel like a few people now are aware about the Erin's Dream cause but I feel like if we had a few more weeks then that would give us enough time to really spread the awareness since we were running late on allot of our ideas that we have had planned. Overall if we were to redo this project I think we learned from our mistakes and we would do a better job on our communication skills and split up the groups more evenly. 

Erin's Dream Project

In the past weeks our project has been making great progress. This week not so much. Our communications skills have just gotten worse even though we all know that we have to improve on them. From what I know, our commercial, that was supposed to be up two weeks ago is still NOT up and running. However, our posters are hanging up in the hall ways and people are beginning to spread awareness to others which is a huge plus. The shirts that we have order are suppose to be coming in at the end of this week. As a class we decided to wear them all on the same day so people are more likely to notice, the date that we picked to wear them is on Friday, February 24, 2011. We hope to sell all of the shirts that we order, this will help to spread awareness as well as make money to give to Erin's Dream. Independently, I have gotten a few more people to donate money and agree to buy shirts.  According to the Google docs plan, We were scheduled to have a bake sale about a week ago but I haven't heard anything on that recently, so I don't think we are going through with it. I feel that as time passes on we are not really following the action plan as much as we should and we are kind of slacking on the communication skills. We could work on this by building on the old action plan we have to help figure out what we still need to accomplish to reach our goal and how we hope to accomplish it in the given time we have. Overall, I think we all kind of feel the same way about how this project is going and will work to fix the problems that we face. 

Third week

This is the Third week of our Erin's Dream project. Our last work day in class we ordered the t-shirts so they should be coming in about a week or so. I went around and asked my friends if they would like to buy a shirt and got three out of my four people to agree to buy one. Rachel and I also continued to go around during period seven lunch to collect money and spread awareness. We told people what the cause was and how they could help. Together we collected twenty dollars which combined with the rest of the fundraising group will add up to a lot more. Our fundraising goal by February 3rd was $50 and so far we have made $90.12 which is way over our goal. I think that as a class we are improving our working skills each week and are doing a better job of communicating as a whole, which a lot of other people as well as myself was worried about. The Posters are finally up in the hallways so people will be more aware of what this foundation is. As a class, each student wrote a letter to a person or organization to help spread awareness to others in and outside of our school area. I wrote my letter to my close friend who does attend our school convincing her to help me and others spread awareness and to help us by donating any extra money she has. I think this will have a great improvement on our goal because it gets the word of the cause out there fast and easily. The TV commercial for the announcements are still being worked on and we hope to get that up as soon as possible. 

Second week

As our spreading awareness project continues, we run into problems. Our class works well together but sometimes we split off into groups and don't communicate as a whole. This has a negative impact on us and ends up being a mess. One problem that arose while doing this project was the spreading awareness, we planned on having posters and signs up a few days ago, then the fundraising group would begin to collect money. Since the posters were late on getting done the fundraising group started to raise money without people knowing what they were donating too. This set us back on fundraising money because most people didn't want to give money to an unknown cause. We overcame this by explaining to people what our cause was and what Erin's Dream was. I worked with Rachel on Monday February 6th to raise money at seventh lunch. So far we raised six dollars in just one day. We hope to raise more money throughout the week to meet our goal of fifty dollars per week. With all of the fundraising people working together this goal will be well over accomplished. My class mates thought of a great idea of making shirts(with the cause of Erin's Dream on them) and selling them to others for money, the shirts are around seven dollars and we would sell them for about ten giving us a three dollar profit to donate to Erin's Dream. I think that this is a great idea and will help us reach our goal even faster while spreading awareness rapidly. Our goal for next week is to figure out how much of each size shirts we need and to continue to collect money while handing out posters to spread awareness of grieving families who lost children to childhood cancer. 

Beginning of Erin's Dream project!

The first week working on our project was successful. Our class worked well together but there were some downfalls that occurred. When we were creating the action plan it seemed that everyone wanted to do their own idea and didn't fully consider the other ideas that were offered to them. However we did overcome the problems, our final plan is still a bit shaky on what we want to accomplish and how we will accomplish it. I think that if are class gets together and takes 10minuets to discuss the plan we could have it all sorted out and we would have a better time understanding what it is that we have to do for every week. Our plan consists of three different categories, fundraising, advertising and marketing. I signed up for the fundraising group. I worked with Rachel, Jordan and Brandi. Together we decided on a well throughout plan on how to attain our goal of fundraising money. As a class we decided to split the fundraising group into lunch periods and collect money during lunch. We decided our starting date on when we would begin to collect the money and how much money we would want to collect. We would collect the money in coffee tins and print out labels to paste on the tins so people would understand what they are donating for. Rachel and I decided that we would print out the labels by the beginning of next week and begin to collect cans to store the money collected in. During Rachel and my lunch period on Monday January 30th, 2011 we asked one of the lunch monitors (Mr. Mogg) for permission to collect money during our lunch for the project, he gave us the OK to do so. By next week we hope to have all of the labels printed out, posters handed out to student so we can start to spread awareness and begin to collect money on Monday February 6, 2011.