Today’s Plan:
- Extra Credit Opportunity
- Community Engagement Projects
Below I lay out 4 different project options. We will be working on these projects for the next three weeks. That gives us this week to do preliminary research, next week to draft and develop content, and a third week to revise and polish materials before delivery.
Extra Credit Opportunities
I’ve got three upcoming extra credit events:
- Wednesday, November 1st: Abbo on Wolves
- Thursday, November 2nd: Dia De Los Muertos
- Thursday, November 9th: Nope at Lindou Auditorium (basement of Michener Library)
Option #1: Go West Grant Writing Project
The first project option this semester is to research funding targets for the Go West Film festival. We will use the libraries CRC database to put together a preliminary list of targets (Proficiency Deliverable #3). I have the start of a list from fall of 2022.
Once we have a list together, then you will want to use the Foundation Directory Database to investigate our potential targets. This will provide us with a much more detailed understanding of their typical gOnerant award and funding priorities. Unfortunately, I do not believe that the Foundation Directory offers a free trial anymore (these used to be available for 24 hours but I see no mention of them anywhere on the current website). This means we’ll need a group to travel a bit.
That trip should produce a slideshow of screenshots, something like this (that slideshow was for the Poudre River Trail Corridor Inc).
NOTE: Depending on the level of access the public libraries offer, you may have access to even more information, including a grantmaker’s 990-PF forms (these are tax forms for non-profits). Our research becomes stronger if we are able to mine additional information on the giving histories of our best targets.
If we spend this week and weekend gathering research, then we can spend next week actually drafting the report. That link goes to a Hanover Research report, which can serve as a structural/organizational model for our own work.
Option #2: Go West UX/UI Report
The second project centers around the Go West Film Festival website. I believe the site could use some love, and this group will put together a list of potential changes–both in terms of content and user interface. My goal is to pass on that report to whoever interns with the organization next fall (I’ll be looking to recruit an intern for the organization for Fall 2024 in ENG 328 this spring).
There is an obvious catch to this: the design team hasn’t worked on UI so far this semester. But, with a bit of reading, I think we should be able to conduct a basic Usability Test. We might dedicate a day of class next week to run a “card sorting” test of the web site (a pretty common, user-driven exercise to explore top-level navigation).
First, we’ll need a catalogue of content currently on the site. What do they have? This practice is commonly called a content map, and building one helps us to understand what assets they have and how that material is currently organized. So that would be this group’s first priority: to build a content map. [The previous hub spot link has a template; alternatively, students have done this in Google Docs]
Second, once we have that map, then we will want to put together a report on the site that discusses a reorganization and lays out technical issues.
Option #3: Go West Social Media Content Calendar
This project develops from the third proficiency project, in which I asked you to develop a content strategy document (how do Campbell’s 6 different content strategies map on to Go West?) I haven’t seen the third proficiency project, so I am unsure how much progress you’ve made here. The research stage of this project, then, is to finish up that project, data mine the peer organizations you identified earlier for content types and suggestions, and have a catalogue of the kinds of content you think Go West could produce and distribute.
The second stage of that project would be to develop a social media content calendar that maps out content for September, October, and November of 2024 (assuming the film festival is the second week of November, the 4th through the 8th). This includes creating photo assets, drafting copy, and mapping out times of the week for an intern to respond to comments.
Option #4: Publishing Research
Finally, I have a one or two person project. I want to try and build out our internship program, and to do that I need a sense of where in Colorado I might place students. I found a website that lists 74 different publishing houses in Colorado. I need some folks to go through that list, contact organizations to see if they would be interested in developing a potential internship relationship, identifying if interns would be expected to be on site or could work remotely, and other stuff that I cannot even think of yet. Put simply, I do not have time to even go through this list to check how many of these places are still operating (I have no idea how old that website is) and how many of these places are geographically viable (though I know UNC students sometimes commute from pretty far away) and/or how many of these places have contacts for potential interns.
Homework
- Grant Writing: Synthesize existing Go West funding possibilities into the spreadsheet I’ve linked above
- Go West Web Site: Read Riley Kerr and Rae Friedensen’s Lifestories Usability report. Make a copy of it to use as a template (keeping headings but removing previous content).
- Social Media: Revise Deliverable #3 and send me a copy so that I can read it before Wednesday’s class
- Publishing Research: Let’s Talk.
