Sunday / Wednesday meeting – 1.5 weeks until our event

The meeting this week was in two parts. We realized through our SWOT analysis that there was not enough time to plan and execute ideas with just one meeting a week - so we have added a meeting on Sunday when we can do it.

On Sunday, we met to work on our marketing plan. We discussed words that we believed connected to our project and described who we are and also want to be. These will help us differentiate ourselves from the others groups.

• Youthful, Enthusiastic, Active, Fresh
• Daring, Audacious, Courageous, Gritty
• Visionary, Idealistic, Noble
• Current, Relevant  

The first word is the word that stands out to us and the synonyms are words that also fit the connotation that we are trying to match.

We also worked on recipes for the dog biscuits and thought about packaging. They wanted to make sure that we don't use plastic for packaging and Nate will work on a sticker for the brown bags that we have sourced.

We also practiced our small talk skills at dinner when we had pizza outside on the deck. We took the questions from the small talk lesson and asked each other different questions throughout dinner. It was a great exercise where we got to know each other better.

On Wednesday, we were focused on learning about what a promotional mix is through watching videos of successful promotional mixes from winners of the Effie awards. Nate and Eitan wrote down different ideas from the videos and we discussed using some of them for our activity - partnerships, scavenger hunts, packaging, and signage. We will also use our social media and word-of-mouth in our promotional mix.

Nate answered the following questions so that he had an understanding of the event and our motives.

• When someone participates in our events, we want them to feel, first of all connected with the community, and second of all energetic and actually excited to participate.
• “Community” in terms of our project is seen as the members/homeowners of Las Catalinas being able to come together and enjoy spending time together.
• We always want our participants to want away with the feeling of connection and want them to convey that feeling to other members of the community to bring them together even more.
• In our promotion, we can use either examples or pictures of what Las Catalinas used to look like and the community strength we used to have.
• We can control the opportunities for the members of our community to attend, however what we cannot control is the actual participation of these events. A second example, we can try and control what feelings the audience brings away from these events, what we cannot control is what people really take away or transmit, possibly bad attitudes toward our project.
• We can take note of participants and how much we see people talking to others who they don’t usually talk to. Additionally, we can write down how many treats we sell to see if we made profit.

And we all made dog treats, which took longer than we thought! We also realize that we need to make more.

Eitan is working on the math to find out how much each batch costs to make and we will use this to set pricing next week in our meeting.