Opportunity for New England Nonprofits: Student-Designed Event Plans

For their final group projects, students will work with nonprofits to understand their target audiences and design a new event for them. The nonprofits will gain a plan to guide their new events, and we hope the organizations can host these events in the future. This is an ideal opportunity to work with a younger demographic and see what types of event may work best to reach 20-somethings.

Students will conduct a phone interview to better understand nonprofits’ goals and target audiences. The projects will develop a new event concept and provide a plan to support it. It’s a great opportunity to tap into a 20-something mindset.

Please note

Students select which nonprofits to work with; they are not assigned in the hope you’ll see some passion in their work.

This is not an internship: Students will be delivering a well-designed plan and will not be there for events (although beyond-class arrangements can be made with students).

Highlights from the actual event-plan assignment

1. Interview a development/marketing professional at your nonprofit so you can better understand and thoroughly describe in your event proposal:

• Target audience
• Goals
• What types of events do the nonprofits think would NOT be successful

 2. Create a NEW concept (as opposed to them giving you ideas). Thoroughly describe your event:

• Detailed assessments of target audiences that would attend your event. Be sure to discuss personas.
• Describe the event and outline as many facets as appropriate: venues, timelines, features, food, entertainment, etc.
• How you recommend promoting your event to various target audiences (hint each may require different tactics)

I look forward to providing my students an opportunity to create portfolio-level work that will benefit resource-starved and worthy nonprofit organizations in New England.

Thanks so much for passing this information along to nonprofits in your network who may be interested,

Suzanne aka Prof. McDonald