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In an effort to empower students to mindfully create and execute independent social impact projects, The Project Builder was born. This website uses the framework of human-centered design to guide an individual in ideating, innovating, and executing a community-level project. The site is open-source for continuous use. Its creation was supported by the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation.
University Students. The tool can be used for any student who may have received funding for an independent project, to complete an action-oriented thesis or class project, or anyone planning to do truly impactful and non-harmful community work.
Project Builder was ideated by students, for students. The Beeck Center hired three student analysts over the course of one-year to complete this project. The project was directed and supported by a staff supervisor.
As a Program Manager, this was one of my proudest works to support students through. I helped guide students through conducting research, interviews, and design thinking in order to build a holistic final product.
Interviewing, Advising, Facilitation, Focus Groups, Research, Front-End Web Development
I was working alongside a student analyst on improving the Beeck Center's signature student program, GU Impacts, in Spring of 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic was unfolding, our work dramatically shifted from improving a well-structured program to completely rethinking it for a virtual format. Non-unique to our cohort, students everywhere were losing their summer plans due to travel restrictions and retracted offers.
How might we, as educational promoters of social impact work, provide a way for students to cultivate an impactful summer independently?
Design Thinking Inception. Our design thinking approach to building a solution to our question made us realize students could also use design thinking to build out and implement their own projects.
Working alongside expert design thinkers, we built out a framework and explanation for students to follow for project design. This was documented in a very. long. GoogleDoc.
Before taking the project further, we wanted to ensure there was an interest and need for our tool. We sent a targeted email out to students who subscribe to our newsletter advertising the opportunity to beta test the Project Builder.
Our email results in 48 clicks to view the document. Of those unique clicks, 46% clicked the interest form to learn more.
We beta-tested our google doc and structure over the summer with a small group of eight students. These students received virtual workshops from our fellow Emily Tavoulareas, a subject-matter expert in design thinking, to provide guidance through each phase of the Project Builder and support students as they planned their projects using our tool.
As all good design goes, we took our feedback from the beta-testing over the summer and prepared to create a second version of the tool. We conducted interviews with several stakeholders:
We new our GoogleDoc wasn't user-friendly or easily accessible, so we scoped out the best way to digitize our work.
After conversations with a few different platforms and learning instructors, we decided GoogleSites would be best suiting for our timeline and resources.
The Project Builder remains an open-source website for anyone to access and utilize. View it yourself and let me know your thoughts!
