May 14, 2011 in Blog, Project Updates by Ryan

Review of the Winter 2011 term

We finished another term of work developing our plan and our organization as we work towards creating a student-run financial institution. Our executive and staff met seven times over the course of the term in addition to our weekly director meetings. We promoted our initiative, recruited more Laurier students into our staff, and held an outreach event on the Laurier campus. We joined Communitech’s venture services group to benefit from their advice and support.

Meetings
In our meetings we welcomed new staff and presented and discussed issues such as:

• Department planning
• Organizational overview
• Corporate entities and co-operative structure
• Business model development
• Marketing of financial institutions
  

Staff

• We expanded our executive by hiring associate directors into our three departments. New staff also joined the project.
• In addition to our organizational meeting and closing meeting we also went out for a staff social.
  

Marketing

• We held an outreach event where a member of our staff Adrian did magic tricks and staff told students about our project and get them to sign up for more information.
  

Media

• Our Facebook group grew to 137 members.
• We tweeted 16 times and our Twitter feed grew to 104 followers.
• We had five posts on our blog attracting 1,921 pageviews in 942 visits.
• A reporter for a national post-secondary publication interviewed us. The article has yet to be published.

Thank yous

• Thank you to Alex and Marc in Communitech’s venture services group for their guidance.
• Thank you to our associate directors: Nicole Covello, Kathy Lu Zheng, Emily Na, Stanley Rao, Abirami Ananthan, and Jamie Lee.
• Sr. Director and Director of Human Resources and Training Erica Yao and Director of Marketing and Communications Tyler Planeta put in a lot of work this term.
  

Past term’s goals
We achieved three out of five goals for last term:

• Completion of our business plan –> now near completion.
• Expansion of the executive team –> eight associate directors hired for the term
• Grow our team to involved more WLU students for the purpose of being a true trans-campus initiative –> successful, hosted event, meetings, and recruited staff from WLU.
• Negotiate with potential partners — pushed back to this term.
• Compete in pitch and business plan competition –> did not achieve this goal

Spring term’s goals
These are our goals for the coming term:

• Consult with advisors and enter negotiations with potential partners.
• Develop our financial model.
• Transition to a Facebook page from our current Facebook group.
• Promote our project further
• Further analyze our market research data.
• Implement our website design to match our logo and visual identity.
• Review of Fall 2010 term 16 Dec 2010