While we are finished with all of our “mandatory” blog posts, the reason for that was a bit of an inconsistency between brief and course outline, and the perfectionist OCD in me can’t let go of the fact that I was “supposed” to do this blog post. I wrote it down in my agenda. So that’s pretty much set in stone. So if I don’t do this I might have a mild heart attack…
So! Here it is. Our progress on our cause campaign project so far.
Beginning this project was interesting. The majority of the class had preemptively signed up to work with HUB cycling, but after hearing both speakers, switched to work with CPAWs. Our group (myself, Kai, and Matia) was no different. Just goes to show the power of a good presentation.
After choosing CPAWs we moved forward with brainstorming. Our group found initial brainstorming hard because CPAWs’ problem is very multi-faceted. They need to explain to the general public what an MPA network is (something that took a speaker 20 minutes of passionate presenting to explain to our class), get people to care about the fact that we need MPA networks in Canada, and have people care enough that they are motivated to do something about it – hopefully by contacting an MP.
Our group created some competitive analyses (analyseses? analysises?) as well as a summarized brief, a description of CPAWs current situation, and mind maps. My personal mind map is above. After this stage our group moved forward with trying to hammer out concrete ideas. We had to generate 60 roughs and decide on our 9 best ideas from these. Below are my 60 roughs and the 3 ideas of mine that we decided to go forward with fleshed out more.
Overall, our group is finding it hard to strike a balance between finding a solution that answers all of the problems in the brief, but is still a reasonable project to execute, especially considering a not-for-profit’s budget. In fact, finding that sweet spot for this problem almost seems impossible. Matia and Kai both had solutions that were more practical (for example, print ad ideas) but maybe didn’t solve all of the problems laid out in the brief, and I had solutions that were the opposite (giant campaigns): they answered all the problems in the brief, but they were probably too lofty to execute. Normally at this stage in a project you have a visual in your mind of what the finished product will be. That isn’t the case at all here… which is both exciting and terrifying.
Mostly terrifying.
Stephanie Brennan 