NPBid has started: This Wednesday, we finally started our charitable auction. This has been in the works for the whole year now. This was intended to be our project and when we put it on hold, we had no idea how the project would finish. Now, the auction has started and has had a successful start. In under two days, we have received around 45 bids on our items. This was a lot more than what we were expecting. So far, the most popular items have been the Butler T-Shirt, New Palestine Dragons Shirt, and the New Palestine Dragons Sweatshirt. These 3 items have so far totaled for $63. Other items such as our windbreaker and the Roy Hibbert Jersey are doing well also. We have made a total of close to $200 dollars so far and we still have a week to go. Advertising: With the help of fellow NPBidders: Luke Ramsey and Matthew True, we were able to create some nice advertisement flyers that we shared via twitter. Since they have experience with an Interactive Media course, they were able to use photoshop to get the word out. We have been using twitter as our primary means of reaching out to our audience. Also, we have received some help from Mr. Large with sharing the auction to all staff across the Southern Hancock Schools. This has been a big help as the majority of our bids have been placed by staff. This is also important in telling us that we need to try and reach a student audience and their families because that is where this project could start to rise. Here are two of our advertisements that were made: What's Next: With a week left, we are set to beat our original goal. We are just getting started and plan to reach out to a wider audience before the auction is over. We have a good feeling that this project will be a success.
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Nearing the Beginning: We have just finished up all taking all the pictures and are currently deciding starting prices and other minor details. As of right now, we have 24 items that will be up for grabs. Although this is not as much as we had hoped for, this is a good number as all of this will be given to Riley Children's Hospital. We are still deciding whether having two separate rounds will be a good idea or not so that is not fully decided on yet. The Website: Instead of using a web address where we have to pay the service ( one of the issues we encountered when we were first working on the project back in October and November ), we have decided to implement a simple google forms / google sheets. We believe this will make it easy on us and easy on the user. We created a list of each items and their current bid price. Then, we added a link which will give some pictures of the items and the chance for the user to bid on the object. Since this is on google, we will have to change projects manually but we are not worried about that since we get emails every time the form is filled out. One of the main advantages of using this google site is that all of us will have access to change it and we all can be on at once. Here the front page: Potential Start Date: We are hoping to start within the next week. We have been talking to Mr. Large and discussing when is the right time and we are confident that this should start soon. We want to be able to allow plenty of time to reach as many people as possible.
Update From Last Post: It has been around five months since we have last worked on NPBid. We came across details that we did not have complete control over so we had to put it on pause while that solves itself out. The website was our main area of concern. The website was going in a direction where it would of had a price tag so that became an issue with the school rather than us. So, while we waited for that to work out, we started our other project, the Breakout Box. However, we are back to the project now. We have been working hard to get the auction up in time for the last month of school. What has been going on?: We have collected all of our donations and are currently in the process of photographing the clothing for the website. We have decided we are going to be doing a google form type auction. This will take the cost down to $0 and it will be simpler to use. Also, we will all be able access the form to be able to edit the prices as the requests pile in. We have many different shirts of all sizes and, as well as, some windbreakers and sweatshirts. Here are a few items: Timeline: As I stated before, we are hoping to have everything ready for the beginning of May. This will give everyone a span of three weeks. We have yet to finalize the timing of how the auction will work and how long the items will be up for grabs. Next week, we hope to have everything photographed as well as the website fully functioning. We are working on a test run with the class. We anticipate this to be a big success. There are only a limited number of items so we hope there will be a good fight for these items. As of now, we are on pace for the beginning of May but hope to be completed a week before so we can leave the last week for minor adjustments.
Target Grant Proposal: Recently, we took a trip to Target in Southport to apply for yet another grant. We decided Target was primary target due to their charitable history. We filled out all of the forms including why we deserve this grant and how would we use this grant. Along with some tax forms and other miscellaneous information, we hand delivered the forms to the customer service desk in the store. After turning these in, we scoped out the store for sections where we would spend the majority of our grant. Other Grants and Current Progress: We have also applied for grants from Build-a-Bear and Kroger as some smaller grants but sadly, those got denied. Getting accepted and denied for grant request is just a part of the process so we are not too disappointed knowing there are more possibilities. NPBid in the community: During the Class 5A State Championship between the New Palestine Dragons and the Decatur Central Hawks where the New Palestine Dragons were victorious in a 28-14 final score, Coach Kyle Ralph represented the New Palestine Dragons football team by wearing a sweatshirt that was made by Guedel Apparel Store that we had a promotion with. It was apparent that our sale gave the community the dragon apparel needed to support our team. Here is Kyle Ralph wearing one of the sweatshirts during our Riley Fundraising Event. Here is fellow NPBidder, Luke Ramsey and I right outside the store after turning in the grant request.
Guedel Project Completion: Last blog post, I stated that our current projection of profit will be close to $140. However, that projection was far from reality. Instead of $140, we managed to bring in over $350 for Riley! This was honestly very surprising to us. We had a late start because of the late notice Sunday night leading into the week. Also, we still did not have the go ahead to see if we were allowed to do participate in this event so we had to get Mr. Large's approval. With our promoting and some key connections we made, we were able to get the word out to the entire community. We beat our projected total by over $200 which is a great start to our project. Grants: Lately, we have been focusing our attention on grants. We have already found success with Dicks which gifted us a grant of $100. Now, we are focusing on Walmart. There are three location within 10 miles of us so we had many choices. However, a requirement from the Walmart website said that the store had to be the closest store to our "office". So, with that in mind, we chose the Walmart on Washing Street. We filled out a project proposal detailing our project and some other questions that had to be answered from their guidelines. next, we stopped inside the store to talk to the customer service desk to obtain the next form which deals with legal rights and business operations. Once we finished, we returned to the store and turned our request in. What's Next: We are still working on expanding our connections and continuing the development of our website. We still have a lot of progress left but more work equals more successful opportunities. Also, we have collectively came up with a list of other potential organizations for which we will pursue a grant.
NPBid has developed dramatically since our last update. We have gained numerous items and have developed an important deal with a local clothing store selling New Palestine High School Football gear. So far, we have improved our list of potential donors as well as been in contact with the majority of them including Pacers, Ball State, and other colleges in the state. Guedel Design Our biggest project lead so far has been with Guedel Design. Guedel Design is a local team store for our high school football team. We first contacted them for the sole purpose of seeing if they would like to donate to our project. However, he countered with an even better deal. He offered us 15% of all proceeds on his online store for the week (10/15-10/21). Having no traction with our project yet, we immediately accepted. This was very important to us because we finally had revenue coming in. As of right now, 10/19, we are set to make around $140 from Guedel alone. The bottom of Blog #2 has a spreadsheet of the current profit we are set to make through 10/18. Dick's Sporting Goods Last week, we tried to go above and beyond. Instead of contacting local colleges and community based stores, we tried top tier companies. To our surprise, we actually got a response. Dick's Sporting Goods has a location 20 minutes away from us and we thought they could be a perfect spot for items. We called them and they had us fill out an online donation request form. A week later, they mailed us 5 packets of coupons, more than enough, and $100 grant to use in the store. On Wednesday 10/17, we left class and journeyed to Dicks to claim our grant and use the money. In total, we secured nine items. An experience we had at Dicks was where we helped a guy save almost $60 using the excess coupons we had. Other Notable Actions Some other notable actions include a trip to the Pacers Fan Jam where we met Kyle Krol, our Pacers contact. He gave us some Pacers items. Some of these clothes are from the 1970's! Ball State has just confirmed our donation request which is currently being processed and sent. Team Image donated 5 items worth around $100 in store. With previous clothing items from the past NPBay, we have accumulated a total of 26 items. Initial Plan NPBid was initially a backup plan to our main project. After some conflicts, we came up with NPBid. NPBid is rebranded version of a discontinued project called NPBay. My group and I thought about some things that the New Pal community has had and now does not exist due to people not continuing the project. NPBay was a successful non-for-profit auction site that has brought thousands of dollars to many different charities. We decided to pick up where they left off. The last year that NPBay was operational was 2015. Quick Turnaround Our proposal was time-limited. We had just three days to take this idea and turn it to a reality. We decided to not use the old name. We wanted to create our own mark for this project so we decided as a whole that our name should be NPBid. We wanted to still represent the New Palestine community but we wanted to change the direction of the website. After confirming our name, we ran into some big challenges. Since NPBay was a class project, there were multiple people covering all of the contacts and donations. Since we only have a team of four strong, we had to take initiative and get ahead of the contact processes. One thing we changed this year is focusing on getting big name items to sell. The old NPBay had many donations of teams from DII and DIII schools. Although that is great, we want to have teams that people will want rock if they want to attend sport games and cheer on their favorite teams. Our original outline for the project creation is here: NPBid Outline. Proposal Day Proposal day was a very successful event. When we presented our proposal day powerpoint in front of many administrators, we knew they had previous knowledge about the old NPBay website. We knew that nostalgia will help them back up this project and give us ideas that were used during NPBay's time. PROGRESS Progress at this point has mostly slowed down. We have a load of contacts who we are getting in touch with but at this point, its all about patience. We recently went on a visit to the local team image store and were able to receive a few donations. The team image store gave us our first donations of what will be many. Other contacts that we have and are in the works of receiving donations include the Pacers, Indiana University, Purdue University and others. Some other major decisions we have worked on include the functionality and which website we are going to use. We have found some pros and cons of some key website we will utilize. Here is a list of our analysis of a few helpful website which will help us run the auction. Auction Site Analysis |