In 2013 learned about a charity event called a Student Jailbreak. It's popular in the UK, and the event riases money by having students travel as far as possible from their home university with no money, raising funds along the way. The team that gets the furtherst in 36 hours, wins.
I knew I had an opportunity to bring an exciting and novel charity event to the University of Waterloo. But I wanted to gauge student interest in running such an event, to make sure that there would be enough willing participants in the event were to happen. So I decided to develop the online presence for the event as an experiment to gauge people's response and level of interest.
Some of my first thoughts on running a Jailbreak.
There was no documentation or official method for running a Student Jailbreak, so I first spent some time talking to the organizers of the previous UK events and sifting through their press coverage as research. I needed to make sure I understood the essence of a Student Jailbreak: what makes it appealing to participants, and how successfuly run one.
Once I had developed an understanding of the key components of the event, I had to create a channel to communicate and share this idea with others. I decided to use the jekyll framework, which is a static blog generation framework, to create a website for the event. This website was the minimum viable product that conveyed the key information required for a visitor to decide whether the event was of interest to them.
The aesthetics of the MVP was also important: the website needed to look complete enough for the event to be taken seriously.
About page - UW Jailbreak.
I reduced the participant process into three key steps. This became the pitch to the participant, in the sense that they should convey the core value and excitement of the event in order to convince the visitor to want to participate.
FAQ page - UW Jailbreak.
The purpose of the FAQ page was to answer any secondary questions about the event, as well has help establish a sense of legitimacy and thoroughness.
New page - UW Jailbreak.
After the website essentials were complete, I created Facebook and Twitter profiles for the event. I decided that I would use membership levels to the Facebook Page in terms of likes and to the Twitter page in terms of follows as an 'interest' metric. I also used google analytics to help get a better sense of how much trafficw as going through the website, which could provide an metric for total traffic.
Then, I started conversations online and in person with friends and various students. I attempted to gauge their interest in either participating or helping out with the event. I shared the Facebook page and website with as many people as possible, driving traffic to the site and membership to the social pages.
After a few weeks, I looked back at the relevant metrics across the website and social platforms. Although the website and Facebook page received decent traffic, there wasn't enough interest to justify continuing with the event. Experimenting with the website was a valuable way to quickly gauge interest and viability.
You can check out the website at uwjailbreak.com.
