Presentation Day

It's funny, but until Binka came over this morning for our meeting, I hadn't even thought about the presentation I'd be giving. I knew I wanted to take her and the rest of the team through everything I've been working on, but I really hadn't thought of it as this is the BIG presentation, the culmination of my work. Guess that's a good thing.

I did spend much of the weekend finalizing everything. But when this is your office, it's very hard to complain about working over the weekend.

I wanted to make sure I had covered off on all of my deliverables - strategy, segmentation, contact lists, emails, forms, website updates, even logos and merchandise. Sadly my go-to designers weren't available to help me out on the logo, so thought I'd try something myself and if it flopped, I'd have time this week to get some actual design help.
So this morning we sat down - Binka, Janet, Imran and Binka's friend who is in town visiting, who also happens to have worked in Universities handling development (not a bad sounding board at all). I took them first through the strategy - what is our goal, who is our audience, what does our audience want, how do we talk about the existing education program, how should we talk about it, what should we say to who. This led to some good conversations and insights about audience motivation, from differing points of view around the table - Binka knowing her donors, her friend understanding university administrators, Janet and Imran understanding the student perspective. Then I took them through my executions and my idea for a scholarship program to offset the student costs. Everyone seemed really pleased with the email templates I put together, the ideas for social outreach and they even liked my logos. I'd say it was a pretty successful meeting.

I feel like an enormous weight has been lifted. Weeks 1 and 2 were full of uncertainty about what I was doing here and personal doubt, week 3 it finally started to come together but I was worried I wouldn't have enough time to do it all, and now in week 4 I just need to put the finishing touches on everything and hand it all off in a nice, organized package. WOW! What a ride.