Goal: Focus on success and purpose of events
Likely the second largest initiative I helped co-direct during my four years was the iHelp Day of Service event. iHelp served as the perfect mix of service and management experience for me. When joining the team in 2011 as the Web and Registration Co-Director, it seemed that iHelp was being rebuilt and recreated annually. Being such an enormous event, this seemed irrational and quite inefficient. During my time as the 2011 Co-Director I helped build the public website explaining iHelp while also customizing my registration system to help with the logistical challenge of handling 2000 participants.
The intent of iHelp was effective and the concept of sending volunteers to the community was acceptable. What I focused on to make the project and program more effective was the administrative aspects. Strong administrative backing is just as important as the purpose of the program. Noting my technical skills, I attempted to put these strengths to use. Also, my experience with logistics, thanks to ExplorACES, definitely helped the program be a success. iHelp 2011 went of relatively well, but there was definitely room for improvement in 2012.
This year, I decided to take a step back and let other Student Alumni Ambassadors gain the experience I had. Noting my technical knowledge and the customized system I built, I remained as a technical adviser for the iHelp 2012 team. During this year, I trained the new registrar and served as a secondary support staff, while developing new features on the system that the team requested. Through the team work and the improvements on top of the 2011 improvements, we were able to experience a higher turnout rate and much smoother check-in experience. Communication with participants went off almost flawlessly and volunteers were very satisfied with their experience. iHelp provided me with a chance to test out my program and project effectiveness skills and then go back and refine those skills based on my one year of experience.