Featured Project: Innovate WithIN
Last semester, the Digital Corps was invited to help with an exciting project called “Innovate WithIN.” Innovate WithIN is an initiative from the State of Indiana that rewards entrepreneurship. Its mission is to promote skills that will make Indiana’s youth excellent future leaders. The client commissioned us to build a website, film promotional videos, and create advertising assets for the statewide pitch competition. The competition gives high school students opportunities to hone their innovative and entrepreneurial ideas for the chance to earn scholarship money. With just over a month to complete the foundations of the project, Corps students overcame a challenging deadline with teamwork and persistence.
Here at the Corps, projects are usually broken into semesters. Innovate WithIN, however, had a much shorter timeline. We accepted the project in November 2017 and needed to finish the bulk of the work by January 1 — an ambitious feat compared to the usual semester-long time frame. Eddie Metzger, a Communication Master with the Digital Corps and Junior Project Manager for the Innovate WithIN project, expedited much of the planning process to accommodate for the quick turnaround. The Corps typically has an onboarding stage and planning process before jumping into asset creation, making Innovate WithIN an incredibly unique undertaking. Most of our projects require strict completion dates, but having a little over a month to produce deliverables added tension and urgency.
“This site was a pretty big accomplishment. Many projects have deadlines, but Innovate WithIN started later and was due at the end of the semester,” said Eddie.
Each of our five teams (Development, Communication, Video, User Experience, and Design) collaborated to build the website. This project exemplifies the unique Corps ambition for students to work together and produce assets in a short amount of time. The site challenged developers, who had to: program the back-end, create sign-up forms, and build parent permission forms from scratch. Seth Winslow, a Development Master at the Corps, used theoretical analysis for computer applications to determine each possible outcome of the registration process. Seth and his Development Team members worked with the User Experience Team to test these registration forms and ensure that high school students could easily navigate the site. For example, the competition requires parent permission, so our teams tested how far applicants could get through the registration forms without parent permission. By having Corps students simulate users and go through the user process, Dev and UX figured out how to make the site more user friendly.
“It was a very collaborative project. We had to communicate to hit our deadlines in order for the next task to stay on track,” said Seth.
In addition to development and user experience, the Innovate WithIN project called for content, video, and design. The Communication Team wrote content for the site, scheduled and created weekly MailChimp newsletters, and implemented our first ever paid social media advertising campaign on Facebook and Instagram. The Video Team created a series of three videos featured on the site, and will be filming the regional competitions. The Design Team collaborated with staff to design the front-end of the website and made promotional assets, such as T-shirts, for the competition.
This website is how Indiana high school students will pitch and submit their entrepreneurial ideas. The grand prize of the competition includes a scholarship, an internship, mentoring possibilities, and $10,000 cash. Digital Corps students assisted the Ball State team in overcoming the difficult deadline, and as a result, helped high school students find their own ambition. The website may be finished, but the project isn’t over yet. The Corps also created a site for an Indiana Innovative Educator Conference sponsored by Innovate WithIN, and will be filming the regional pitch competitions to add to the first site. Check out our hard work and learn more information about the competition on the Innovate WithIN website!
