Water Project Week 3

This week I achieved quite a lot for my Water Project.
On Wednesday night, my mom brought home 160 copies of the flyers to put in people's mail boxes. It took us a while to cut and fold all of the flyers. But here is a picture of all the flyers we made on Wednesday.

It doesn't look like much, but that is 160 flyers. After that, I put them into people's mail boxes. But, there were a few mailboxes left, so on Thursday night, my mom brought some more flyers home. Here is a picture of me handing out the brochures.

By Thursday night, every mail box in my condo had a flyer in it.
I would've liked to pass them out earlier because most people only check their mail boxes once or twice a week, so a lot of people might not have seen the flyers in time for my event. But, the flyers do have information for donations, so some people might email one of us for donations. We had some extra flyers with us, so we were handing them out to anyone near the function room or anyone who came.

This week we held our even in my condo's function room. For the most part, it was successful. The brownies that Freya made sold out in the first few hours, but we were still left with some cookies. The wristbands also sold better than I thought they would. We ended up handing out a whole lot of flyers, which I was really proud of, because the flyers really inform people. They are also something that people can keep, and they spread awareness. I imagined that a lot of people would collect in the function room to watch my presentation and Freya's demonstration for the kids, but it was mostly people coming and going. What we started to do is walk up to people, show them the flyer, and ask them if they want to buy cookies, brownies, or wristbands. This attracted quite a few people. We had some customers that bought in bulk. For example, one man had a dinner party, so he bought eight brownies and three cookies.

Above and to the right is a picture of how we set up our sale. I had prepared a short presentation on the Water Crisis, but I never really gave it. There were a few groups of people who were interested, so I walked them through the flyer, and explained everything in detail, because I had a lot of knowledge about that.

The picture above is slightly blurry, but it is of Freya and I with our first customers. We drew them in by telling them we were selling baked goods for charity.

We didn't want the water filter demonstration to go to waste, since no one was doing it. I realized that no one was doing it because we didn't tell them about it. So there was one lady who's kids really liked our baked goods and kept coming back for them. So we asked her if her kids would like to see a short demonstration, and she was really happy about that.

Another thing we did to draw people in is I made a poster, and put up printouts of the flyers on the window of the function room. Here are pictures of that.

Finally, I finished my movie for our project and uploaded it to YouTube.  Here it is. 

At the end, we made around $200 in total. I learned that you really need to think about how you are going to draw people in. I could've delivered the flyers earlier; asked my mom to inform people she knows in our condo; and maybe even walked around the condo talking to people about it. I expected people to collect in the function room, rather than having groups of people come and go. I didn't think about what other people would come for.

Also, even though we earned $200, we spent a lot of money. We spend $3.30 on each wrist band, and we started by selling at $5, but not many people were buying them, so we dropped the price to $4. The function room costs $40 to book. At first, I was thinking that I would have to earn enough money to pay my mom back for the function room money, but she said that she was like a sponsor for our cause, so we didn't need to pay her back. We are not sure if we are going to pay Freya's parents back for the wristbands.

One thing I would want to change about this week is to divide the work up better. I felt that I was doing most of the work, and my partner wasn't doing as much. What I could've done about this is assigned my partner some of the work I was doing. I felt this because at certain points, I was getting really stressed about it, and my partner didn't have that much to be stressed about at all.

At first I thought bake sales were really generic and not very professional, so I didn't really want to do them. But then I realized that most people really like bake sales, so they are a good idea if you are trying to draw people in.

I will definitely remember interacting with the customers this week. One memorable one was a man who bought things with his family at first. His four year old son came back about 10 minutes later and handed be a handful of change. His dad said it was all of his savings.

To end our Water Project, we were thinking of going to present to a fifth grade class. We could present and sell baked goods there, so we earn more money. If we do make this decision, I think we should act on it quickly because in the past weeks we have been slow at doing things.