What We're Doing - 30 May 2008

This entire last week, we've been working on a website for the last week. We started thinking about how our website would look and function with a team of three people. Now, we have a team of 9 people working on the website! Our team is divided into three groups: content, code, design. The specific tasks of each group will be detailed below:

a) Designers - these are the people who will be making stuff on the website look nice. This includes but is not limited to making backgrounds, buttons, and other graphics for use in our website. Oh, while we're on this thread of thought, I should mention that we've decided as a team to build our website in Flash. This is not optimal in terms of remotely editing our webpage easily, but it has a great potential for looking really nice. Anyways, the design group will basically be taking care of aesthetics.

b) Coders - this group will be coding the website. Since the website is built in Flash, the main task is making objects move as desired with Action Script. This group doesn't have much to do with how the website looks as much as how the website works. I think the first task the coders will tackle is just making a basic layout with a menu bar and a box to display content.

c) Content group (no -er here) - this group decides what to put and where to put it. They'll be doing things like writing the mission statement of the Strength of We, or project descriptions and deciding where to put it on the website. While the designers decide how the website looks in terms of graphics and the coders make it work, the content group really decides what message our website will convey, thus making it a very important group.

We really can't progress in the direction of raising corporate sponsorship or anything else because we don't have the specifics of the trip yet. As far as I know, we don't know where the team is planning on going and when. This is a real hindrance because we can't just ask people for money without knowing what's going on. Oh well, the strength of we is much greater than the strength of me. We can still do this!

What We're Up To

Hey! This week, we are focusing primarily on the website layout. We had something positively beautiful from a team member, but someone from another class, who is, admittedly, the God of HTML, suggested something else, which I think that we can all live with. The idea is a "searchable database" (I'm still a little hazy on this bit) where we can have all of the Strength of We projects and have the opportunity for future Strength of We-ers to add their own projects, looking for help. I've been told it will be a Wikipedia/Creg's List combination. Right now, we don't have NEARLY enough information for a whole database, but I think that we will soon, if we can get this off the ground. 

I (Kit) am still waiting for the information that I will hopefully be receiving here soon about what exactly I should tell airlines. I'm prepared to make that call, but it seems that difficulties with the contact have arisen. Therefore, I provide help as the un-internet-savvy person of group, giving whatever I can to make it more user (and un-technologically-savvy person) friend as I can. 

Stephen is working hard and has put together an (awesome) slideshow in Flash that tells a bit about the Strength of We. I think that we're going to use it as a sort of "home" page. Or at least that was the plan this morning. By now, everything may have changed. 

David is still working to get us an estimate on what it's going to cost to send all those kids and if $150,000 is really enough. Sure, labor is great, but we need to be about to fund this clinic as well. Or at the very least, that would be incredibly cool. 

Lynn is working on some research to see if there are any past companies that have funded this kind of thing. So far, we know that Oprah has supported it with her "O Ambassadors". She is also working on things a little closer to home, fundraisers and whatnot that we can do right here, right now. 

Thanks to the team!

May 21st, 2008

Ever since we we're given this question, my group has been working very hard to do whatever we can to get sponsors and donations. We've each been tackling different tasks to reach our goal of earning $150,000. The things that we've been doing are: looking for discounts on airline tickets for the flight next year, looking for the contact information of different celebrities, looking for corporate sponsors to help with our funding, thinking of fund-raising ideas to start actually planning them and putting together the Strength of We website. To help with the advertisement and try to give people more knowledge about what we're doing, I [Lynn] have recently posted a blog on my Myspace page to inform fellow Myspace friends of what is going on and to get the word out to help raise money. What I plan on doing within the next week is contacting all the celebrities that i got contact information for and informing them about our plan [hopefully gaining some sort of donation]. We've definitely got a lot of work on our hands to accomplish our goal by April 1st of next year, but I believe if we all work together we can do it!

Today's Accomplishments: 16 May 2008

It's actually quite annoying what I learned today. What did I learn, you ask? Well, I learned that the chief fundraiser for our school basically doesn't want us asking for corporate sponsoring because she's afraid that we will interfere with what the school plans to do in the next six months (aggressively asking corporations for donations/sponsoring). This works against our cause, as fundraising a solid $150,000 is a lot more difficult than just raising say, $75,000.

Also on the note of fundraising, our group considered the addition of a PayPal donation box for The Strength of We (the organization that's going out to help people in Peru and other places around the world). This would help greatly as, if people feel greatly moved to help our cause, they could easily click a few places and donate to us. The problem with PayPal is that PayPal actually takes off a percentage off all donations, which is a big hindrance to us.

Hm, what else? In our group, Kit is still looking up various airlines that fly to Peru, in hopes of asking them for some kind of discount so that travel fares would be less, allowing the use of money towards actually building the medical clinic and helping the people of Peru. It would also be great if we could get the same kind of help from hotels and/or restaurants, etc. On a side note, if everybody in San Diego, more than 2.5 million people including kids, donated one cent everyday for one school week, our goal would be met. If we could get corporate sponsoring that would match us to an extent, the amount we could make would be amplified greatly. This just goes to show that the little people matter. The problem with this proposal is just getting the word out to everybody. It would be really awesome if radio stations, newspapers, online advertising (such as Craig's list), Myspace, Facebook, etc. could help us get the word out.

There's obviously a lot to be done within the next 3 or 4 weeks. I suppose next week, we should being getting the word out to people around our school to see what they think and if they have any kind of input on how we could go about raising the money. Also, we should begin calling up the airline companies, contacts in Peru, anybody that could help us minimize the cost of the trip so more goes towards the actual cause. On the note of calling people, we should also call or email PayPal to find out if they could deduct less or no money from donations.

Something that I hope I can collaborate on with some members of other groups is to get a website going for The Strength of We (if we can get the URL from Darrell, that would be great). This would be very useful for getting the word out because we could direct people to information about us much more easily.

150,000 Dollar Question

We have received our question for the project we are doing. It is as follows:

What can you do to raise $150,000 between May 15th, 2008 (tomorrow) and April 1st, 2009 in order to send 50 High Tech High students to Peru to build a medical clinic?

Though this might sound as though its just a project for a problem solving or economics class--it's really a lot more than that. We need to start the fundraising process. We need to begin to come up with the funds. Most of all, we need to have a plan.

First of all--the first step in that plan--we need questions. They are as follows:

• Who can we get involved? In the school? In the community?
• Which corporations could we get involved?
• What is the money for really (The clinic? The tickets? The hotels/meals, etc?)
• Where could we market this idea?
• Can we move past city boundaries?
• Who should we target? What's our audience?
• What is our timetable?

Starting right now, we're trying to come up with a way to raise that money. You can help. Give suggestions, opinions anything. If you want to donate, contact High Tech High and ask for Darrell McClendon.

Please, we want to help people in Peru!!

First Post

Just because I didn't like that there was no content on the blog, I'm going to add a post now. Besides, this can function as a test of our blog and stuff. So our group is: Kit, Lynn, David R., and Stephen.