GDC membership/ambassador project

The area of focus that our group did was ambassador recruitment, volunteer opportunities, and a tangible unique membership package making the GDC more engaging and have stronger legitimacy.

Our mission goal was to increase student engagement and involvement with the GDC. Making them more aware of the benefits and current news such as upcoming scholarships etc. Our target audience is catered towards university students studying graphic design and illustration residing across Canada. Our membership package would be given initially to all new members, and members could subscribe to receive one annually, including, poster/info, stickers, pins, tips, tricks, and resource links. The volunteer engagement would continue over many years, with different activities. The ambassador recruitment would happen over a two-year term for the next nominated student ambassador. We believe the solutions we are proposing could work and could improve the disconnect between students and the GDC.

Our group consisted of 3 people. In the beginning, we were mostly focused on the membership package that you would receive once becoming a member. However, we moved further away from the tangible membership packaging box concept. Ultimately, going with a simple affordable envelope that would contain the poster/info and goodies. In the end, we ended up having the membership package, ambassador recruitment form, volunteer opportunities, and GDC/ambassador apparel.

Our process began with:

  • First doing mood board/direction research and rough sketches of design concepts.
  • With the design ideas gathered we worked as a team on identifying what was working what was not and design keepers. We continued to brainstorm and kept our ideas flexible. All of our work was unique to our own. However, we did try to bring the designs more together at the end to make them look more cohesive.

For the ideation process, we started by:

  • Brainstorming ideas for packaging, pins, and stickers, and design layouts.
  • We continued receiving helpful feedback from our instructor to make alterations and add ons/takeaways to our concepts.
  • With additional refinements and guidance, we did not end up with what we started with but covered a lot more ground and touched on many platforms. Ultimately, reaching students as much as possible, through social media and interactive experiences.

Instructor/classmates recommended the following adjustments:

  • Add volunteer engagement
  • Change package idea to mail envelope
  • Alter recruitment ambassador process
  • Remove postcard system
  • Remove certain apparel items, keep hats

The various collateral I worked on in my team was the Kahoot game (which was passed onto another team) The brochure side of the poster, the 3 stickers, and the ambassador recruitment form. Each of my team members had an equal workload amount.

I believe I deserve an 8/10 because I contributed concepts/ideas and communicated well and was on time for meetups and due dates. I believe I could have done research to get a deeper understanding of how the GDC works. I believe as a team we deserve an 8.5/10. We worked good as a team, we communicated well and gave each other feedback as well as listened to instructors. The improvements we could have made would be to make all of our work look even more cohesive as a unit and done more mockup examples.