One sense of collaboration

Hours: 8:00am - 12:00pm

Finished up a presentation proposal for CSPA. Put together driving directions for 5 buses for service day to tag on to a residence life bid for NFTA buses. Counted how many out of the 486 orientation registration webforms we have received, how many students indicated interest in the saturday of service. (25.3%, which projects to 379 first year students participating in the saturday of service; not much above the VSLC's typical spring service day amount.)

Today I learned the very hard way to save my document when i download it from my e-mail. special thanks to Ching from the help desk. I owe him cookies and my first born for finding all the changes I made to my proposal.
When trying to determine projects that we would need buses for (keep in mind we haven't even started soliciting projects yet because Phil has taken more than 2 weeks to have a student assistant put together a webform). So - how to you not only give someone a number of buses, but also firm destinations for those buses without having talked to community partners? (1) make some phone calls, (2) evaluate relationships/partnerships, (3) figure out agencies that are physically located near each other. The real answer is anything and everything you can when free transportation is on the line. In the process of putting information together, i was working between 2 buildings, 2 computers, and 3 user accounts, and 3 e-mail addresses...that's 12 different hard drive locations a document i needed quickly could have been. it's time to consolidate.

We didn't end up getting free buses for reasons beyond my control. The more exciting part of the day was actually in tallying up who is interested in the saturday of service. Looking at the webforms, i realized that not only do we have e-mail addresses and banner ID numbers for tracking purposes, but we also have other useful information, e.g. what classes they sign up for, majors, learning communities, etc. knowing the correlates will allow the VSLC to be able to target marketing initiatives to those specific populations. For example, if students who opt in to the service day tend to be undeclared majors and also in learning communities, we can market in those communities more, give specific information/conversations to advisors for undeclared students, and maybe even purport that students that sign up for the service day option are looking for social connectedness with BSC and peers. pending further assessment, of course.