During this week, please do the following.
- Step 1: By Friday, please do one of three things. As with the solicited proposal, you will have lots of opportunities to abandon ship and find a new project/audience in the next few weeks.
- Add a post to an existing thread. In addition to the usual “Discussion X-Y” header, please add “#UnsolicitedAudience.” (Yes, that’s a hashtag. I want to make this easy for folks to CTRL F through the various audiences for our next proposal.) In the body of your post, please identify a potential audience who would also be interested in project you pitched with your solicited proposal.
- Create a new thread. Please use the hashtag listed above. In the body of your post, please identify a new project you want to get support for and a potential audience you could write to (or create mass-mailing/mass-contact materials for).
- Create a new thread. Please use a different hashtag than the one listed above: #CrowdfundingAudience. Please identify a project you believe would benefit from a crowdfunding platform (e.g. Kickstarter, Experiment, IndieGoGo) rather than a traditional proposal.
- Step 2: By Friday, please expand on
your post from Wednesdaythe first part of your post by telling us what you know about your target audience. If you are doing the crowdfunding option, please describe your target audience. Yes, anyone can see and support a Kickstarter, but successful crowdfunding campaigns are directed at a narrow slice of the internet.- What do they value?
- What projects have they supported in the past?
- What is the limit on their ability to provide support? (i.e. How many dollars could you expect from them, or if you’re asking for other kinds of support, what’s the limit of that support?)
- What do they already think about your project? Or, when they first see your proposal, what is their initial response likely to be?
[example]
Example
I want to get members of my community to donate school supplies to help restock elementary classrooms next Fall, particularly because COVID, distance learning, hybrid learning, distancing requirements, etc. all impacted teachers’ ability to rely on students to provide their own pencils, crayons, paper and other goods, and they had to provide all of that over the last year. It was actually really nice as a parent to not have to worry about that stuff, so I’d like to help the school provide those things to all kids.
I’m asking people in a specific neighborhood in Klamath Falls. K Falls folks tend to value community, as shown by the fact that they’re willing to risk an “Extreme Risk” COVID rating just to keep eating at local restaurants. I don’t know if that’s the best way to show community spirit, but it’s what we’ve got. Ultimately, though, K Falls is limited in the extent of support they can provide, and that usually manifests as an unwillingness to fund projects beyond how things “used to be.” The normal parent shopping list at the start of a school year tends to be $20-30 (school supplies only!), so I would expect that my average donor might provide $30 or a little more. My average donor in this neighborhood is likely to be a grandparent or someone else who doesn’t have kids going to the school, so I bet they’d support 1-1.5 kids’ worth of stuff.
I don’t know the right medium to send this out—whether I should use a letter, social media outreach, a billboard or something else. Most likely, the people with kids are not going to like my message. I think their starting disposition would be Shame at the idea that I’m saying we should all pitch in to support classrooms, rather than relying on individuals to make that choice on their own. But, I’m really interested in getting the people who would feel Pride/Shamelessness in K Falls schools and in helping out the kids.
There are 486 students. If $30 is the average price of school supplies for one kid, I would need to raise $14,580 in cash or school supply donations.
[/example]
Process
Please note that I intentionally weight discussion boards towards simple participation, rather than making some number of discussion points. I want you to engage with each other, but I don’t want to force it. To that end, our course discussion board is going to be … weird.
Whenever you post, please write at the top of your post “Discussion X-Y,” where X is the discussion number and Y is the step number (1 or 2). That’s what I’ll use as a signal for which assignment you’re doing, if any (or if you’re just responding to a peer for funsies).
This is going to make a pretty giant mess when it comes to grading, so I’ll try to give feedback as quickly as possible, but getting the points in the book will be another matter entirely.
Grading
Discussion boards in this class are all worth 5 points. The first post is worth 2, and it is graded on whether or not it was completed on time. The second post is worth 3 points, split between the quality of your response and the timeliness of it.
Step 1: You’ll get 2 points if you post your initial audience statement by Wednesday night. (Obligatory wiggle room statement: I’ll start checking Thursday morning, but your peers might be looking sooner.)
Step 2: You’ll get 2 points if you cover all four items (values, past support, ability to act, starting disposition) in your response, and if your response is up by Friday night. You get 1 point just for attempting this step.
