Background
My name is Ashley Hidalgo and am a Senior majoring in Human Services & Social Justice with a minor in Psychology. As a first-generation college student and daughter of hard-working immigrant parents, my passion for direct and indirect service started at a young age. Motivated by my past experiences, one of my long-term goals has been to ensure that low-income and immigrant populations in need have the proper resources, advocates, and access to educational opportunities. Within the GW SfS foundation, I am a member of Team 3; Comm. Pr. and Recruitment, serving as the Executive Director. In this role, I was in charge of all the duties outlined below, in the communication/marketing plan, in addition to team management.
Capstone
Entering my final semester, I was unsure what our class Capstone would entail. Given the fact that this year would be different from the previous years, my only insight was that it was a class project that would entail us in creating a Foundation, with the generosity of LxG, to give to an eligible non-profit organization of our choosing. However, many questions arised, such as, how could an entire class work together as a team? What issue areas would we ultimately choose?
A few weeks into Capstone, we brainstormed various issue areas, and ultimately decided to focus on Immigration and Education (which are issue areas that are interests/passions of mine!) Dr. Kelso then advanced to discuss the team project and the description of the various teams and I was immediately, drawn to Team 3 (Communication, PR, and Recruitment). My excitement derived from the previous skills learned as a Campus Campaign Coordinator for Teach for America and previous relevant course projects within the Human Services & Social Justice Program (such as, Non-Profit Management and Organizing for SJ in HS) and being able to apply it for our class foundation.
[Of those combined skills included; recruitment data management and outreach, grassroots organizing, on-going communication with clients, and leadership. In result, I was excited to begin the process of envisioning a campaign strategy that would be manageable and attainable.]
Brainstorming
That weekend, I then met with Team 3 members, Wynn Hollis and Jocelyn Lobos to discuss and add to the campaign/recruitment strategy. In result of my excitement, I actually had a campaign plan outline and drafted, and when meeting Wynn, contributed by working on our new Website (as noted in the next blog post) and Jocelyn, on our mandatory weekly Team Report (which was an overview of our meeting). In this outlined proposal we included many crucial parts such as an overall summary, recruitment strategy, web page handling, communication, and marketing plan, a weekly action plan, and Facebook post schedule.
Below is an example of our Communication, Recruitment, and Marketing Plan
Social Media Presence:
Post 2-3 times per week on Facebook about different topics
Create a Linkedin page
Create a guidebook (How to market your HSSJ course experiences)
Webpage handling:
Create a logo
Create a webpage with a FAQ, About us, and History section
Recruitment:
Research relevant nonprofit organizations and update (that would benefit) using the research list from Team 2
Research the contact info of "invite-only" non-profit organizations
Reach out to 50 +nonprofit organizations in the DMV
Create a flyer and blurb to send out to GW entities (organizations, departments, class pages, etc).
Client communication:
Create a Gmail account
Create a signature for SfS
Create a signature for positions
Create email templates before sending out emails (follow-ups, reminders)
Advising
Meet with Dr. Keslo before class to discuss updates, next steps, highlights, and challenges (if applicable)
Class engagement
Update class on class efforts through BB, groupme, and email
Ask and create google forms for classmates in our class to: like the page themselves
Ask others to like the page, comment, Like specific postsss, and share the page,
Create a database for the class to enclose whom they reached out to
What Next?
That following week, we then went over our Team Report and the outlined campaign/recruitment/and marketing proposal to the class. After the presentation was over, it was to our surprise that we received helpful feedback and suggestions, such as additional Facebook posts ideas and recruitment strategies. In-between the next classes snow day in DC, and with a few last minute tweaks here and there, we then we edited it and started assigning various responsibilities and roles.
In summarization, having met as a group, receiving feedback, and finalizing the Proposal -- I am ready to being implementing, understanding that it will be a process of growing and learning! I will take into consideration how Team 3's roles can be seen as time-consuming and a big responsibility and how hat each one of our roles in the class are truly elemental because, we are one the first few steps in the latter in impacting change! I believe that my personal motivation will be propellant to move forward with this project and influence members in my group to learn the skills I learned in #comm and #pr . Lastly, I am thankful for this #onlyatGW opportunity and #lxg for their generosity, and am looking seeing the hard work pay off (ending results).
-- Ashley Hidalgo
Responses from our class
Thanks for your post! As a member of Team 3 with you and Jocelyn, I agree with what you are saying about the design of our campaign strategy. I found what you said about your initial decision to join Team 3 to be interesting because although I was also drawn to the communication and PR elements of Team 3 at the start of our course, I did not have any prior experience and was hoping to gain knowledge in this field. It is great that you had so many skills from other roles such as being the Campus Campaign Coordinator for Teach for America, and I can attest that these skills have only been further refined through your great work on our campaign strategy. In our social media strategy, I wonder how this may be affected by our timeline since it is difficult to gain a social media following in a short time period. While social media usually maintains a large impact on many organizations and businesses today, I wonder how it has affected our Foundation and whether we are able to maximize its use in a short time frame. I also agree that I felt overwhelmed at times because our roles feel like a large responsibility both to ourselves and other team/Foundation members. However, your skills with organization and design have shined throughout the work of our Team and this campaign process. I look forward to continuing to work on our website, social media, and manage the communications for our Foundation and to further refining our skills and gaining experience in this area that we can use in the future!
-Wynn
I really enjoyed reading your thoughtful and gracious post. I appreciated you highlighting your background and how various aspects of your life and HSSJ experience culminate into this Capstone experience. I agree that many of the skills we developed in previous HSSJ classes aid us in Capstone and that Nonprofit management is a perfect example. It is interesting being on the other side of the grant process as a foundation. Having learned more about the grant application process during Nonprofit Management we delved into what funders look for, writing with concision, and structuring budgets. Now, as a foundation, we have to market ourselves, but in a different manner. We are learning techniques on sending Requests for Proposals (RFPs) and how to field questions that organizations may have. Additionally, I appreciate how you laid out the work that the Communications, Public Relations, and Recruitment team is doing, for it is vast. Your class engagement has been wonderful and, from my perspective, helps the class to continue knowing where you are and how we can collaborate.
-Grace
Its so nice to see that we share very similar goals! I am an immigrant myself, and of course, being a child of immigrants has shaped my values, and view of the world. Especially, seeing my parents preserve through language and culture barriers growing up. This only made our group topic on Immigration and Education more meaningful to me as I can see if was meaningful for you as well!! Being a child of an immigrant also provided me a first hand experience to the need of resources and opportunities for this particular group of individuals. It is great to read your post and your journey through the class project. I believe the online presence was an essential part of our success, with out it I do not believe we would have had a competitive batch of applications. It is also crazy to think how easy technology has made it for us to communicate, learn, and engage in conversations. Thank you for all that you did for our class, you have been a great asset!
- Arshia