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.
On-Campus Marketing Plan
Much of eHacks' operations on campus is run by campus ambassadors and student volunteers. The goal for this project will be to create marketing materials and a marketing plan to recruit the next team of superstars that will run eHacks at our partner universities. The marketing plan can be for one school, many of them, or all of them!
Online Course Curriculum Development
The goal for this project will be to outline a set of key concepts and learnings, of the students' choosing, that will ultimately comprise an immersive online experience for students to explore technology, innovation, and business. The end product of the students' work will be a script which can be transformed into an online course with the assistance of voice actors and our team of programmers.
Web Design
eHacks' website has not been updated in over a year, and reflects our previous mission of exclusively running events at Western University. As the organzation expands and our mission evolves to focus on broader issues, like technical education and career readiness, our website will need to grow and expand as well. The objective of this project will be to bring us one step closer to a finalized design for our next version of the eHacks website. The activities required to accomplish this "next step" will be based on where our team is at on the design, but may include updated graphics, user experience studies, writing cover for the website, and/or assisting us hone our strategy and determine the best primary foci for the website.