Case Study: Student Fund-Raising Project essay
At the moment students face the problem of the development of a fund-raising project by CFS members to support the local pediatric intensive care unit. However, students face the problem of accurate planning of the project. They also have problems with finding sources to raise funds to complete their projects successfully. Moreover, they are uncertain that they are capable to raise funds sufficient to complete their projects that will be frustrating for them because they are going to make a lot of efforts to work on the project.
In such a way, students confront several problems. First, they fail to identify sources of fund raising to complete their project. Second, there is no project team yet. Third, they are not sure that they can raise sufficient funds for the project that means that they need to assess the potential fund raising project. Finally, students have the problem of the distribution of functions and responsibilities within the project team, which is just forming.
In such a situation, students should create the project team first. Then they should distribute functions and responsibilities between all team members that will optimize the team performance. Third, they should elaborate the plan of the fund raising project (Beach, 2000). They should also identify possible sources of funding and decide, which sources are the most effective ones to focus on them entirely to raise funds. As they elaborate the plan, they can start implementing it. In the course of the plan implementation, students should monitor whether they implement the plan successfully. If they identify any problems, they should introduce changes into the plan to eliminate problems and to complete the project successfully.
In fact, students should focus on different sources of funding. First, they may organize a public event, such as the charity auction, where they can sell paintings created by children cured in the hospital’s intensive care unit. Second, they may focus on the direct communication with local businesses to ask them for financial aid and support of the project. Third, they may just communicate with local community members, creating leaflets and developing the website of the project to receive donations and to communicate with the public.
The latter option may be the most efficient one because it focuses on the large scale community involvement in the project. Moreover, this option is transparent since users can visit the website of the project any time and track how their donations are used as well as they can ask any questions about the project at the project team directly.
At the same time, the communication with the local community and developing the website of the project raises risks and problems. First, the technical problem of developing the website arises. Second, the problem of the promotion of the project may also be quite challenging because the website may remain unnoticed by local community members, why leaflets may not always be effective. Third, students may fail to distribute functions properly and the project may start stumbling, for instance, when the user support team of the website fails to work effectively (Stier, 2011). Fourth, the proposed option may face a risk of under-raising funds.
Students can find volunteers among those students, who have experience of developing and promoting websites. In addition, they should communicate the idea of the project to community members through personal encounters with community members, meetings, engagement of parents and children in need of health care services. Finally, students should distribute functions between members accurately and focus on fund raising.
