Year
September - December, 2014
Type
Team, Class, Charity
Role
Graphic Designer, Videographer, Event Coordinator, Photographer
Tools
Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Pro
The Climb for Life is a biannual stair-climbing charity event held at Harbour Center and the Vancouver Lookout Tower. A new cohort of students organizes the event throughout an academic term and the event is hosted by 25toLife, a partnership between SFU Beedie's Project Management class and the Canadian Cancer Society. Our team had the priviledge of hosting this event, applying project management techniques that we have learned throughout the class towards the success of this event.
Our goal was to raise $3,000 for our event and $27,500 as a class. The event was a success, raising over $5,000 in donations due to the large turnout of around 80 people and as a class, we raised just over $28,000. Our team's promotional assets were created by myself and was used to create awareness for our event in a real-world setting with favourable results.
Promotional Assets
Key Promotional Materials
In addition to social media and word of mouth, we knew that creating promotional materials would generate more awareness for our event.
I designed a traditional paper poster which we would pin onto cork bulletin boards and a digital poster which would display and generate awareness at our venue, Harbour Centre. I also designed the
facebook banner for our event page.
Promotional Trailer
Working on a tight schedule, I filmed this promotional trailer for our event in one shooting in one day with the help of a team member acting as the climber in the video. I spent another day editing, post-processing and producing the video by myself, working in Adobe Premiere Pro.
The trailer was released less than a week before our event and gained some attention. However, the trailer was an additional promotional material, rather than a primary one for our event. We focused on word of mouth and poster promotional assets because we assumed those mediums would help us gain more participants.
Creating this video helped me learn how to work on a tight deadline and ensure that we could allocate enough time for promotions.
Planning Process
Team Logo
Team Logo
Our team was named Bamboo Experiment, so I created a logo for our group as a side project. I finalized and designed our team logo after a few iterations, removing the "experiment" part of our name because it didn't fit the design and I wanted to capture the main idea behind our event at a glance. After a few iterations, I was able to come up with the idea of a staircase in the middle of the logo between the letters "M" and "B".
Initially, we planned on using this logo for our promotional materials, but our instructor decided that any promotional materials created within the class would fall under the 25toLife branding instead of individual teams because the main donation goal was a collaborative class effort.
Network Diagram
Project Documentation
Project Documentation
The network diagram is an essential project management diagram that shows our plan for meeting milestones for our event in a timely manner. I created the network diagram with a team member and finalized the visual look for better clarity.
The project documentation contains a detailed plan for our event, updated throughout the academic term. Some important diagrams that were created for the project documentation were the work breakdown structure, network diagram, gantt chart, RACI matrix, bugdet chart and risk analysis.
Lesson
My Role
I was the creative director, designer and photographer for our team. I created all of our visual assets and ensured that our branding would be consistent by using the color, navy blue, and the same typeface, "Overpass", for our event name, "The Climb for the Life".
I was also a part of two class committees, the website committee and marketing committee, creating assets for both committees as well as assembling the final presentation for all teams for the class's final presentation to the Canadian Cancer Society. Since our goal was to reach $27,500 in donations as a class, students within the class had the choice of joining committees that would support the entire class with accounting, sponsorships, marketing materials and website maintenance on top of any roles for our individual teams.
I finalized our team's diagrams included in the project documentation and assembled and proofread our project documentation.
I also co-wrote the project documentation, analysed risks and attempted to find sponsorships for our event.
Challenges
Communication was one of the biggest challenge for our team because we were the only team of four, versus every other team of five. Since time was limited, cross-collaboration between teams became essential for the success of each event within our class. Being a part of two committees for the class, I needed to manage time and communication between my internal team and the class's committees which became challenging.
Reflection
Communication with other teams much earlier in the academic term would have benefited every team, including our own. Although there was a bit of friendly competition between teams to see who could raise the most money, resources were eventually shared between teams later in the term such as sponsorship prizes and venue spaces.
I evaluated how closely I collaborated with individuals that weren't designers, developers or artists in a real-world setting and found that more patience was required for explaining why I couldn't perform certain tasks in a shorter time period. I also realized that I gained a lot of personal development from working with my team members and learned about my shortcomings of being a perfectionist and improved my personal time management by acknowledging my shortcomings in a real-world setting.
Overall, the communication and role designation was similar, but different from my other typical design teams where team members were able to support each other because we were learning the same material in class and shared similar knowledge. In this class, we assigned our own roles which were loosely defined because success depended on the amount of effort you put it and the tasks that you performed. Event execution was not taught in class and we had to learn through real-world practice while taking the class and how to manage and communicate amongst ourselves, trusting each other for individual expertise.
Fortunately, I was able to work with a great team with diverse talents that complimented each other's weakness. Talents that ranged from marketing experience to operations management knowledge which helped with securing sponsorships, social media promotions, volunteer management, and many other influences for the success of our event.
