Strategic Vision: What do we do now?

eHacks is a non-profit with the mission of providing interdisciplinary learning experiences that empower students to solve pressing social issues through technical innovation. Over the past three years, eHacks has focused on running hackathon-style events based out of Western University. We've invited over 520 students to build over 100 projects, learn from 30 workshops, and connect with industry professionals at top firms (e.g. EY, IBM, RBC, ALPHASHINE, and more). After three years, despite our success, our team has begun to wonder if we are doing the right thing. Hackathons are a crowded market, and with the growth of well-organized virtual hackathons, the barriers to entry have decreased sharply. This project is a call for a new direction. Your job will be to determine if hackathons are still the best route for us, and if not, what we should offer to best act on our core mission. While we are a non-profit, we do spend money. Figuring out how to do the most with our money is critical.

Workshop Materials

eHacks, regardless of where we go in the future, will always focus on education. Every year, we brainstorm through dozens of workshops to offer students on a wide breadth of topics from UI design, to programming, to making a business plan. In this project, you will work with a team to create workshop materials, complete with an instructor's guide, to be added to our workshop collection. Our goal is to create a library of workshop resources which can be delivered by eHacks across many different venues.

On-Campus Marketing Plan

eHacks needs two types of marketing over the next few months: 1) Recruitment marketing, focused on recruiting volunteers to execute on our new operational aspirations. 2) General marketing, focused on recruiting student volunteers to participating in our new operations. Your role is to select one of these marketing goals and build a marketing plan to achieve it. This includes the price of our offerings (i.e. how much we pay our employees, how much we charge for events), places our products/services can be found, the unique value proposition of the services we offer, and how they should be promoted.

External Partnership Creation

In this project, students will work to achieve eHacks mission through partnerships with other non-profit institutions or other social enterprises.