Gallery day was very helpful in receiving feedback on our ideas from those who are most involved in the Boys & Girls Club. They had several comments on how we could best expand our research and ideas to better address the problem at hand.
The first was that they were really intrigued by our research with kids from South Bend who responded that they had ‘never heard of’ the Boys and Girls Club. With this, they asked how we could best target them. It was suggested that the two best ways to do this would be via social media, as they are very active online, and to advertise at their schools.
Advertisements at school were ruled out because of the politics and lengthy process that accompanies trying to get something promotional in the schooling system.
Social media at first drew hesitations as their response was ‘we don’t have a marketing team, or the budget for one’. But after an explanation of you don’t actually have to have one, there will be simple posts from staff end, but most of the social activity will come from kids ‘sharing’ their times at the club when having fun, which is free advertising. This will initially come from the revised schedule seeing the introduction of more events and fun activities at the club, e.g. the basketball tournament.
The second piece of feedback we got was we had to explore the stakeholders and potential partners of the transportation issue. We addressed that something had to be done for transportation, and we recognised buying a bus would be the best thing to accommodate more children, however we were advised to look at the community. Do we want to buy a bus that is owned and operated by the Boys and Girls Club, do we want to partner with Transpo of South Bend to provide the service, etc?