English 420: Business Writing

This week our group met to work on the proposal and compose our contract to give to our client. We had a difficult time in the beginning trying to find a time that we all could meet since at this point in the semester everyone is pretty busy. We finally were able to find a time to meet on Wednesday night. We all came together and started by going page by page of the papers that the other groups peer reviewed for us. We found the changes/mistakes that we thought needed to be corrected and began fixing our paper.

This week our group put together the proposal. We split up different parts of the proposal. I was in charge of the resources needed. On Monday night I put together a preliminary plan of the resources I needed. It was a tentative plan since I did not yet know what the other members of the group were planning. On Tuesday we used the in class work day to work further on the proposal. I read over the groups’ work and finished my section based on the ideas and different documents that they had suggested.

Over the past week, my group put together our ideas and formed the client-based project proposal for the exact client that we identified and would like to work with. We described information that we would like to present to the client as well as the customer and in the exact form that we could use to make it as professional as possible. One thing that we forgot to include was how we were going to include a video portion of the project into our presentation and how we were to include this in our schedule of events as well.

This week was one of hard work and progression for my team’s client-based project. Ryan was able to contact and negotiate with a client named Brenda Lorenz from the Morton Community Center. Mrs. Lorenz expressed an interest in assistance with promoting a dance class for little children. Our group decided that we could format flyers for this program. The intent is for the community center could distribute to these flyers to pre-schools, day care centers, and on local advertisement boards.

This week our group had to complete our proposal. Before we could do this we had to meet with our client Barry Richard, the administrator for The Boys and Girls Club of Lafayette. Tuesday afternoon we went to meet with Mr. Richard to see what kind of documents he would be interested in us making. Every year The Boys and Girls Club looks for donations. He said it would be very helpful if we made something that could be sent out to looking for donations. After the meeting we delegated parts of the proposal to get done for class on Thursday.

In the beginning of this week I felt very frustrated because St. Ann’s Church never responded to my voicemail message. In class on Tuesday, during the workday, my group decided to call some other client-based prospects instead of wait to hear from the other organizations we had tried to contact. We decided to contact the Family & Community Center in Lafayette. Fortunately, I was able to successfully talk to a secretary who forwarded me to Mandy.

After making some initial contacts with a few local businesses, our group chose to work with University Spirit. The owner, Gary Edmondson, had said that he had worked with Purdue students doing class projects in the past, and he was enthusiastic about participating. Our initial idea was to help him with advertising, especially with the upcoming holiday season, thinking we could make fliers or posters promoting any gift specials. He also suggested that we create an email template for employees to use for communicating within the company.

This week we met in class on Tuesday and had a work day. We started writing the proposal and focused on introducing the company we chose to work with and the information that we wanted to include in the proposal. Our group was very productive during the class time we were given. We still needed to meet outside of class to work on the majority of the paper. We met on Wednesday night to work on the proposal and get all the ideas we had on paper. It made it easy since we had already talked to the client and had an understanding of the services we could provide for him.

This week was pretty busy for our group. On Tuesday, we finalized our idea for the project. We all decided that The Boys and Girls Club would be good. Jessie had contacted the director ahead of time so we already got that stepped knocked out. In class, we then figured out how to start putting this rough draft proposal together. We all talked about how the timeline should be put together so we got a good head start on that. After, we decided to split the other requirements that are also needed to be in the paper and have them done for our next meeting so we can put the whole draft together.

This week we finally defined what our project would be. Initially we had a different project in mind but that didn't have as much depth as the one we chose this time. In Lafayette, there is a club called the Lyn Treece Boy's and Girl's club. What it does is provide after school daycare to kids from the Lafayette area. We talked to Berry Richard, the person who is now in charge of the place since two months ago, and he told us to go to his office.